When are 4xxx series graphics going to be on-board?

[plympton]

Anyone know when Radeon 4350 equivilent graphics are going to be on the motherboard? I'd like to upgrade my HTPC to get the power lower (it's about 90-100 watts idle), and would like to avoid the discrete card if I can help it, and the 3300 graphics just don't have the oomph to do all the HD decoding necessary.

-Dan

[Tzupy]

If AMD really wanted to, it would be today. There was plenty of die space and thermal headroom to make a faster chipset than the latest 790GX.
Now that nVidia has a really good chipset for Intel Skt 775, AMD may try to catch up and do even better, but they'll probably want to use the 40 nm process.
What I'd like to see (and buy!) is a 4670-class integrated graphics at 40 nm for the AM3 socket, with on-board 512 MB of GDDR5.

[thejamppa]

... with those specs GDDR3 would more than fine... *drools*

[Spare Tire]

If they integrated a 4670, then who would buy the discrete card?

[tehcrazybob]

If they integrated a 4670, then who would buy the discrete card?

Depends on what the motherboard cost compared to the card, I guess. Even if the integrated setup were to cost more, lots of people want to upgrade their video cards and not their motherboard.

I doubt anything like that will ever happen, though. Integrated systems are typically supposed to provide minimal performance for general use, and a 4670 is well beyond that. Of course, even if the cost and performance were the same as the discrete card, installing an expansion card allows you to tailor your inputs and select a different amount or type of memory.

That said, if they would offer a micro-ATX motherboard with an integrated 4670 and 512mb of permanent dedicated video RAM, I'd buy it; even if it were more expensive than a similar board and a discrete card, it seems elegant and easier to cool.

[Tzupy]

The point here is that AMD would offer it *only* in AM3 form, so they'd sell more of their 45 nm CPUs.
Upcoming Deneb CPUs aren't bad at all, but will have a hard time competing against Intel's low-power quad-cores.
The unique availability of a 4670-class integrated GPU would tip the balance IMO.
What would make it even more appealing to me would be an AM3 compatible cooling solution for the integrated GPU.

[crabnebula]

There were a few reports this past week saying that the upcoming 880G chipset (780G successor) would have the same integrated Radeon 3450 GPU. Disappointing.

[NX3]

"There were a few reports this past week saying that the upcoming 880G chipset (780G successor) would have the same integrated Radeon 3450 GPU. Disappointing."

Agreed, disappointing. I was expecting them to add the 4350, which is much more fitting integrated solution.

I've read the 3450 in the 880g will run at a faster clock speed and maybe sideport memory might be standard (I'm guessing on the sideport). However performance wise the 4350 is a bigger step up, very energy efficient and would be ideal for onboard imo. 4670, unlikely they would cannibalise the mid-range market for upgrades. Also its power useage is much higher than the 4350 so doesn't really make sense for intergration.

[NX3]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/phenom-ii ... 485-5.html

Several times in this article it says the 880G will haev a radeon 4xxx intergrated. However this contradicts every other article on the net so not sure I'd trust the info.

[mczak]

Agreed, disappointing. I was expecting them to add the 4350, which is much more fitting integrated solution.

I've got some doubts about the 4350 being much faster as igp. The hd3200 is already quite bandwidth limited (performance scales more with HT link speed than with core clock...), so adding more shader/texture units might not help much. Sideport memory isn't going to help for that really, as it's only 16bit wide and doesn't offer much in terms of memory bandwidth even if using ddr3-1333 (though it offers lower latency than accessing main memory). Clearly a 46xx gpu as igp would not make sense at all.
Tomshardware published some overclocking results of the hd3200 some time ago, for a 90% overclock (from 500Mhz to 950Mhz) they got a 30% (average) performance increase - that's not that much, and that was using a phenom cpu (that is, fast HT clock). HD3300 is already clocked at 700Mhz, and it's likely further clock increases would only improve performance minimally, as would doubling the number of shader units (which is the most important difference between hd34xx and hd43xx).

[NX3]

I used Call of duty 4 as my benchmark. The IGP 3200 on the 780g board can just about run Cod4 with all the settings turned down. I did put in a 3450 and it made a very small difference. Setting them up as hybrid crossover, again made a slight improvement but nothing like the figures in any review I saw for hybrid crossover. This was on a Athlon 4450e thought not a phenom which has the faster HT clock speed.

Anyway I got a Radeon 4350 recently and it made a big Cod4 much more playable, lots of settings were on and res was up one on the previous setup. Give the specs of the 4350, 3450, 3200 the only real difference is the number of shaders. I've got hope the the 4xxx if they put it in a IGP, if its true.....

[mczak]

Anyway I got a Radeon 4350 recently and it made a big Cod4 much more playable, lots of settings were on and res was up one on the previous setup. Give the specs of the 4350, 3450, 3200 the only real difference is the number of shaders. I've got hope the the 4xxx if they put it in a IGP, if its true.....

Maybe it would provide benefits when teamed with a "fast HT" cpu. Maybe the HD4350 even makes more efficient use of the available memory bandwidth than the HD3450 (larger caches etc.). But the importance of the memory bandwidth limit cannot be stressed enough. There are few reviews which compared 780G with different cpus (X2 and Phenom), here's one:
http://www.amdzone.com/index.php/review ... ew?start=1
In particular note that overclocking the igp from 500Mhz to 825Mhz with a X2 does not even get you the performance of the igp running at stock clock with a Phenom (and that's certainly not because the cpu itself is faster...). You can completely forget about getting close to HD4350 performance with that speculated HD4xxx IGP if you have a HT 2.0 cpu - most likely it would just perform like the overclocked HD3200 IGP in this review mentioned (maybe a bit better but I highly doubt a lot better). With a HT 3.0 cpu, it might get closer, in theory it should as with HT 3.0 there isn't really a bandwidth deficit compared to what the HD4350 has. Here's the memory bandwidth numbers:
HD4350/HD3450 (assuming 500Mhz mem clock): 8GB/s
HT 2.0 (1Ghz): 4GB/s up, 4GB/s down
HT 3.0 (1.8Ghz): 7.2GB/s up, 7.2GB/s down (the total might not be reached due to main memory limitation, which is 12.8GB/s in case of dual-channel ddr2-800).
I don't know how close to peak you can actually get with HT, but certainly latency will be worse than with discrete memory.
Sideport memory gets the IGPs an additional 2.7GB/s (ddr3-1333/16bit). I guess doubling the width of that would help HT 2.0 quite a bit, but driving costs up (2 memory chips instead of one, more pins / more complex pcb routing)