AMD's marketing team is obsessed with optics, it seems. No, not the devices used in British bars to accurately dispense measures of spirits, but the transmission and detection of light.

Yesterday, we had AMD Vision, the chip maker's new brand that PC makers can use to indicate 'good', 'better' and 'best' laptops, and today we have Eyefinity.

It may sound like Jar-Jar Binks' description of George Lucas' bank balance, but Eyefinity is actually about multiple monitors. Alas, the reality is a more modest complement of screens than the brandname implies: six, to be precise - the number of screens one of AMD's upcoming DirectX 11 graphics chips can drive at once.

Each screen can run at 2560 x 1600, so that's a whopping 24.7 million pixels in all, or 7680 x 3200 in total.

Shame it can't do anything about the thick grid of black bezels that nudging six monitors up close inevitably introduces.

The DX11 chip has 2.1 billion transistors, AMD said, together capable of 2.5 billion floating-point operations per second.

To put that in context, Intel's upcoming eight-core Nehalem-EX server chip contains 2.3 billion transistors.

AMD is saying no more until it launches the part later this year. DX11 itself won't arrive until Windows 7 does, on 22 October. ®

Bootnote
AMD may wish to proceed with caution. Eyefinity is a word already used by a Sheffield optician and, more importantly, by a US company that produces software for opticians. Does no one in AMD's marketing department use Google?

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