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IT LOOKS LIKE Asus is designing a mini-ITX mainboard for AMD’s first low-power Fusion chip code-named Ontario.

Details about the motherboard are hard to find. It would appear that Asus wants to put it under the bonnet of home entertainment systems that it has planned, but it could equally end up as part of an EeePC or similar setup.

Word on the street is that AMD’s Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W.

If it can do this then it looks like Ontario will be a viable rival to Atom in the mini-ITX market.

Asus is keeping details of performance or the board’s eventual use close to its chest, although Bit-Tech even applied a Chinese burn to the press officer.

All Asus will say is that it is still early days for its mainboard design. µ

 

Comment on this article Flame Author Print Share this: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Linkedin reddit! StumbleUpon Twitter Share Related articles Pine Trail gets launched and tested A game of spin the Atom Tuesday, 22 December 2009, 08:10 AM Read more Hemlock launches, sites review Pick your poison Friday, 20 November 2009, 10:06 AM Read more AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 BE C3 stepping A harbinger of chips to come Thursday, 5 November 2009, 09:42 AM Read more Athlon II X4 620 and 630 reviewed Quad core on the cheap Thursday, 17 September 2009, 18:08 PM Read more 4GB ASUS GTX 285 tested Rare graphics card shock Friday, 28 August 2009, 09:55 AM Read more Core i5 750 as powerful as i7 920 Uh-oh? Thursday, 20 August 2009, 09:55 AM Read more < Previous article| Next article > Comments Not even close

18 watts for the Graphics chip alone? I get that it’s more powerful than an X3100, but people aren’t building their HTPCs as FPS machines. A high end dual core Atom is 13 Watts FOR EVERYTHING.

AMD, you fail once again.

posted by : Dan, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @Dan

Umm…did you read the article? It’s 18 W for the CPU + GPU + Northbridge. And, given that it will be profoundly more capable than the Atom at pretty much everything , I think it will be quite competitive, in both performance and power.

posted by : Ryan, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @Dan

Boy, can you read? "Word on the street is that AMD’s Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W." 18 watts for everything. I’m not going to argue about the rest you said because i couldnt care less about it, i use a CPU + discrete in my PC and will not use ontario. But man, you gotta start reading more accurately

posted by : StickyGlue, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment Agree

I agree with Dan, but I’m mad as a box of frogs.

posted by : Bob, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment Passive

I hope the final product is passively cooled and the whole thing with disks, 4GB of memory and other IO takes under 60W at full load so I can build that nice, small computer for the little sister moving out of home. The Ontario family should have some "cooler" members as well..

posted by : Anonymous Coward, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @ Anonymous Coward

You may want to look into an Atom-based system. I built a home server using one several months ago and couldn’t be happier. The whole system (including 4 500GB HDDs, minus monitor) only uses 36 watts according to my Kill-A-Watt. The chip is passively-cooled with a big aluminum heat sink, so the only fan in the system is a big 120mm on the rear of the case. It runs cool, even tucked away in a corner under a desk in my home office.

I’ve been thinking about buying another to replace an old Dell P4 I’m using as a HTPC when it finally croaks (which it will. Soon. It’s one of the shoddy Optiplex models they’re being sued over), but this all-in-one solution may be a more viable option.

posted by : Jon, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @dan

Did you get a good paycheck from intel this week?

posted by : AMD Fanboy, 14 August 2010 Complain about this comment atom still sucks for HD

If this system can make a nice HTPC with limited gaming capability, I might be game. And this is just because I deposited my last check from Intel last week.

posted by : Rob, 14 August 2010 Complain about this comment Most read Most commented Most watched Tesco offers a cheap Sim-only mobile phone deal A scary number of security suites fail on Windows Vista An AMD 3.0GHz Thuban processor is in the shops Google tries to save face after its Verizon deal O2 Iphone 4 prices tip up Apple releases a 12 core Mac Pro Nokia N8 tips up online Windows XP SP2 could live on thanks to Grand Theft Auto PC sales are falling AMD talks up the GPU Sony motion controller video demo

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Microsoft Kinect athletics game video demo

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THE CURRENT reference design single card graphics performance leader is the AMD ATI Radeon HD5970. Basically a combination of two HD5870 1GB GPU blocks slowed down by some 20 per cent to accomodate the heat and power limits of the PCIe card specification, and connected via an on-board PLX PCIe bridge, the HD5970 has led the market for nearly all of the past year. Now, prior to the arrival of the AMD ATI Radeon HD6000 ‘Southern Islands’ GPU line in October, there is a kind of unofficial refresh going on at the high end.

Basically, the key vendors like Asus, Gigabyte, XFX and Sapphire are offering sped-up top end graphics cards that would have otherwise qualified to be called, say, HD5890 and HD5990, but since it’s not a full new product SKU rollout, they are considered the accelerated factory pre-overclocked units. At the very top of the pack is Asus’ Ares.

The card has the same architecture as the normal AMD ATI Radeon HD5970 dual GPU setup, and even the PCB dimensions are about the same. However, the GPUs on board run at the full HD5870 individual speed of 850MHz GPU and 4.8GHz GDDR5 memory, and, on top of that, each GPU has 2GB of RAM for a total of 4GB on the card. Wonderful! But, the changes required a brand new cooling system barely fitting the two slot width and, of course, much more power. Here you have two 8-pin plus one 6-pin graphics power connector on the card. Put two of those cards in a QuadFire parallel GPU setup on a, say, Intel Core i7-980X six core platform, and you’ll exhaust a 1000W PSU.

The card comes in an ultra large carton box, larger than even server mainboard packaging. Inside it is a black suitcase, James Bond style, which when open reveals the card and its accessories.

At the first look, the Asus Ares card is big and beautiful, a statement that fits this monstrous card just perfectly. It is impressive looking and, in a defensive situation, with its combination of weight and sharp edges, it could be a deadly weapon.

It took a bit of extra care to insert the card into our initial test platform, the Asus Rampage III Extreme mainboard using the Intel Core i7-980X six core CPU running at the default 3.33GHz clock. The 6GB of Geil Black Dragon DDR3-1600 RAM and an Intel X25-M 160GB SSD, as well as the Thermaltake 1000W PSU in our trusty Xigmatek Midgard-S chasis, which by now has survived three board swaps without a scratch, rounded out the test bed system configuration. The card was surprisingly silent, even during the benchmark runs at full load.

In this initial test, before we try to overclock the card further and use its Asus Smartdoctor and GamerOSD utilities, I ran the usual Windows 7 64-bit platform with the 3Dmark Vantage DX 10 and Unigine Heaven 2 DX 11 tests, as well as Sandra synthetic GPU performance benchmarks. Here they are:

3Dmark Vantage on Ares:

And on the generic Asus HD5970 on the same system:

Unigine Heaven:

Sandra GPU render:

Sandra GPGPU compute, over 5 TFLOPs single precision and 1.2 TFLOPs double precision floating point on a single card, with plenty of local RAM for the job:

And GPU memory too:

Impressive! This is by far the fastest GPU setup in a single slot I’ve ever seen. I wonder how it’d scale in a quad GPU dual card configuration, but what I can say is that Asus has, with this extra bit of engineering, created a true multi GPU performance monster, without sacrificing single GPU performance or memory capacity.

Note yet another configuration opportunity here. If you’re using the card for GPGPU compute applications, where the extra 2GB of memory per GPU chip helps a lot, you are not bound by the Crossfire limits. In fact, in a mainboard like the EVGA SR2 or the Gigabyte X58A-UD9, you could insert four of these ARES cards, each with its own PCIe X16 link, and have eight GPUs for over 20 TFLOPs single precision and over 4 TFLOPs double precision floating point capability, in a single box. All that, of course, assuming that your compute routines are happy with relying on the AMD Stream or OpenCL programming approaches.

In Short
Asus set another record here with the Ares Limited Edition ATI Radeon HD5970 graphics card, at least until and if it releases the rumoured Mars 2 dual Nvidia GTX480 GPU Limited Edition on a single card.

Maybe Nvidia will be nice enough to provide Asus with those rare, kept aside, full 512-shader bins of the GF100 chip to make a thousand core dual GPU card. That thing would need three 8-pin power plugs, even more than the Ares. Compared to the dual Nvidia GF100 card’s projected 600W power draw, this dual ATI Radeon HD5970 Ares card will look positively power saving.

In the meantime, we’ll look more closely at the Asus Ares card’s graphics performance against other GPUs in more environments, as well as how well it overclocks. Watch this space. µ

The Good
Top performance, reasonably compact design, large memory, limited edition card.

The Bad
Since AMD’s next-generation ‘Southern Islands’ HD6000 line of GPUs is just around the corner, there might have to be an Ares 2 soon.

The Ugly
Nothing.

Bartender’s Score
9/10

 

 

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