Throughout history there have been days that elicit tremendous change. August 6th, 1945 marked the the start of new era in weaponry that would forever change the way the world's population envisions warfare. November 19th, 1863 and the short speech delivered that day did perhaps more to unify the United States of America than perhaps any single event in the country’s storied past. November 5th, 1605 was the setting of a foiled plot to destroy the parliament building in Great Britain and probably one of the more powerful reformation-sparking events on record. While it might not be fair to include November 19th, 2007 on a list with these examples, the effect the date will have on the hardware industry has the potential to be relatively as important. Tomorrow, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will be officially launching three new product lines simultaneously, all of which constitute what they are calling a “Spider Platform” – the biggest singular hardware launch ever.

This new platform will consist of a newly-designed core architecture in the form of the Phenom X4 processor class. Features of the new chip include HyperTransport 3.0, a low 89W thermal design power envelope, and a 2MB bank of L3 cache that will be shared by each of the four processing cores. The platform will also include the new HD3800 series graphics cards, previously codenamed RV670, which have been met with relatively positive though lackluster reviews (from a price/performance standpoint) across the web. The HD3800 series parts that made their public debut late last week boast full support for DirectX10.1 (an incremental update to Microsoft’s DirectX10 graphics API), chips manufactured on the 55nm process node, support for CrossFireX technology, and exceptionally low price points. Finally, the 790FX motherboard chipset, which touts features such as PCI-Express 2.0, HyperTransport 3.0, and an incredibly low thermal design power, among others, will round out the day’s festivities from AMD; a company that now fancies itself a “Platform Provider”.

While none of the upcoming products individually present an overly impressive offering to the hardware industry, the three combined – and the way AMD has chosen to implement them – represent what may very well by a shift in the way products are marketed and nudge Intel Corp ever so slightly from the domination they have enjoyed for the past year and a half. When all three of the components are used together in a system, a reworked AMD OverDrive feature will be automatically enabled which supposedly allows for seamless tweaking of the system settings for a significant performance increase. Unfortunately we were not provided with the AMD press material for this product launch, so we cannot provide you with details regarding this feature – or anything mentioned so far for that matter – but such information can be found easily on other websites.

The imminent product launch from AMD comes at a point of apparent turmoil within the company. Most recently rumors are running rampant in regards to the replacement of long-standing AMD CEO Hector Ruiz; an event that many analysts speculate is more of a matter of when than anything else. Financially, the company has recorded a net loss of $396 million USD on a revenue of just $1.632 billion USD in Q3 2007 (DailyTech).
Amidst all the negativity directed towards AMD recently as a result of poor product performance and consequently the lack of competitive offerings in both the GPU and CPU arenas, the Spider launch serves as a beacon of hope for the company. If the platform ends up performing at a level where purchasing it over alternatives makes sense, then November 19th, 2007 will surely be a day that we can triumph as a turning point in the hardware industry.

While FPSLabs was not supplied with any of these products for review purposes, we will most certainly be here to provide you with up to the minute coverage from launch day. Keep it locked to FPSLabs for links to reviews of these products from around the web and our own opinions regarding the results of these reviews.

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