Register Hardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/26/amd_to_show_spider/

AMD 'Spider' gaming platform to debut next month

By Tony Smith
Published Friday 26th October 2007 09:39 GMT

AMD looks set to give its 'Spider' high-end gaming platform its first major outing on 14 November - two days after Intel introduces its first 45nm 'Penryn' processors - Register Hardware has learned.

Spider is based on AMD's quad-core Phenom processor, the company's RD790 chipset - approved by the PCI SIG organisation for PCI Express 1.1 compatibility (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/04/02/amd_rd690_confirmed/) back in April this year - and a pair of graphics cards fitted with the upcoming RV670 GPU.

Motherboard maker MSI announced an RD790-based board earlier this month, though AMD has yet to formally announce the chipset itself, which is expected to ship at the 790FX (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/10/msi_reveals_rd790_board/). MSI's K9A2 Platinum has a pair of x16 PCI Express slots along with four DIMM slots allow up to 8GB of 1066MHz DDR 2 memory in dual-channel configuration.

Earlier this week, AMD confirmed RV670 will debut in the middle of November (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/24/amd_confirms_rv670_launch_details/), so the timing's perfect for the appearance of Spider. The GPU - AMD's first 55nm part - is expected to be launched on 19 November, which is undoubtedly why details revealed during Spider's outing five days earlier will not be available for public consumption.

RV670 is said to be a DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.0 chip designed for PCI Express 2.0 boards. It's said two versions will be offered, respectively codenamed 'Revival' and 'Gladiator'. Revival is claimed to be clocked at 750MHz and paired with the 256MB and 512MB of GDDR 3, both running at 1.8GHz. Gladiator sports an 825MHz GPU and is intended to ship on cards with 512MB of GDDR 4 on board. The memory is clocked to 2.4GHz.