Coaxial S/PDIF And Dual Gigabit Lan On The 990 Series AMD Boards

[Night Gyr]

Nice Sir!

Not probes, though. My first machine was fully GB, in the 775 era... those were the days, eh? I love what Gigabyte had been doing before, with plenty of features, some of them unnecessary. Now they're cutting their feature set down drastically and basically every removed feature moves them an inch closer to losing the crown. What a pity.

[Aussie Allan]

  Nice to know you still acknowledge they still hold the crown,  If you stay away from entry level your still getting exceptional tech and  value for money, I still believe 90% of enthusiasts use less then half of the features they go after in what they buy ...... the whole industry is in flux at the moment with so many new releases from chips to entirely new features......... knowing Gigabyte and a few warning signs , something big is in the wind, Intel are not the only ones that are good at keeping secrets.

 Aussie Allan   

[Night Gyr]

Well see what they did regarding the P67 platform? First the P67A-UD4, pretty basic I/O on the rear panel. Then Z68X(P)-UD4, and voila, Firewire, Power eSATA. I see a trend emerging here. But I wonder what the hell does AMD have up their sleeve in order for this 990FX-UD5 to be the basic one, the pre-release, and something else to play the role of the Z68X(P)-UD4 board from the above case.

Any ideas?

[Aussie Allan]

  I'm really behind the finer points of the current releases, my eye is usually on the big picture and big advancements.......... jumps, not steps forward in the industry is when I look at upgrading ,......I probably shouldn't say this out loud but I find the step to Z68 .....lacklustre for better words, hence staying with the X58 for the time being!......with my current requirements, upgrading right now just holds no value, I do mainly photo-editing on a machine that runs a Quad core at over 4 gig.......my main drive gives me 800Mb/s read and 600 write with 24 Gb of memory........what real advancement (bang for buck) would I get filling Gigabytes coffers right now..........Zero!

  AMD is a tuffie!...... they deferred the "Bulldozer" release yet again..... They need this release to be as close to perfect as possible , I suspect it will be a Major jump from there present offerings and a small short lived edge over Intel but a win is a win, no matter how short lived.

 The price point will be critical but with all things combined , a tightrope walk nonetheless.  
 
 At the end of the day they need to pull a pretty big rabbit out of the hat this time to claw back some sorely needed market share......this could be there last chance shot under there present structure in competing with intel head to head..........AMD just doesn't have the R&D budget nor the roadmap in-place that Intel enjoy from there perpetual revenue base.

 If they fail with Bulldozer, I can see a major restructuring in there long term goals, maybe a shift in the type of target market they go after.......exactly what!....who knows!

 Aussie Allan

Update........just a snip that's worth the read regards the Zambezi chip.....it's ability to run a single thread across two cores just might be the reason for the delay........

    http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20110114134306_AMD_s_Bulldozer_Microprocessors_Expected_to_Offer_50_Higher_Performance_than_Core_i7_Phenom_II_Chips.html