TechPulse 360

On the heels of yesterday’s Intel briefing, AMD is touring Silicon Valley this week to talk about its own strategy and vision ahead of the Windows 7 launch, due on Oct. 22.

Although most of the information is still under wraps until AMD’s own Sept. 10 event, we caught up with worldwide marketing vice-president Leslie Sobon at AMD’s headquarters in Sunnyvale where she was keen to point out some of the work the chip designer did to optimise its upcoming notebook and desktop platforms to support Windows 7 high-end graphics capabilities aka DirectX 11.

“We’ll have the first DirectX 11 games enabled on our graphics cards. You’re not going to see that from Intel… or nVidia either… It’s all about the compute shader… The first pieces of what comes out for DirectX 11 is in the gaming side but it actually translates even into entertainment and video visual quality,” explains Sobon.

Consumers don’t care about the processor

During our conversation, Sobon also commented on the complexity consumers are facing when choosing a new computer.

“Mainstream consumers don’t care about the processor in their system. They care about whether or not they can watch Hulu HD or if the Flip camera video actually runs on their PC. They don’t care if it’s a Turion, or an Athlon or a Core i5… they didn’t care for many many years,” explained Sobon.

AMD will support GPU overclocking

On overclocking – which is a way to increase the speed/frequency/clock of individual PC components like the CPU or the memory -, the AMD executive confirmed the chip designer’s commitment to continue offering a wide range of options for PC enthusiasts to boost or “overclock” every part of their computers, including soon the graphics processor (GPU)!

“What aren’t we doing to help overclockers. We’ve got the chipset that enables it, AMD overdrive that lets you optimise at your heart’s content on the platform side, as well as on the CPU side… We have the overclocking record,” adds Sobon.

For more on AMD plans, we’ll have to wait Sept. 10th!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 pm and is filed under chips, computers, hardware, Interviews, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.