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Welcome to Dragon
As mentioned, AMD's new platform is called Dragon, and according to AMD the Dragon will exceed Spider in being marketed as a complete platform. Originally it was planned that the Spider platform was to be found in retail computers, but in reality it ended up like somewhat of a mirage.
With the Dragon, AMD has decided that it doesn’t necessarily makes sense to pay lots and lots of money for a powerful Core i7 processor with associated components in the form of an expensive motherboard and equally expensive triple-channel memory. Dragon would be tantamount with a reasonable standard performance by virtue of its ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphics card and the ATI Stream technology. The latter allows the graphics processor to take over more of the applications-related calculations which in the past have been reserved for the usual central processing unit.
Stream is a GPGPU solution (General-Purpose computation on Graphical Processing Units) which can be seen as AMD's response to Nvidia CUDA. If the user has a graphics card from the Radeon HD 4000 series and Catalyst 8.12 or a newer driver installed, the many "cores" in the graphics processor can speed up general applications from developers such as Adobe, Microsoft, ArcSoft and Cyberlink.
Nvidia still has a considerable advantage, and since it is expected that the future will offer many more applications with GPGPU support, it will be even more important for AMD to make up for Nvidia’s advantage. At present the number of commercially available Stream-compatible applications is kept to a minimum, while Nvidia on the other hand has already secured support for CUDA in several applications in Adobe CS4, for example. Your average Joe will hardly benefit from these technologies, as modern processors are already able to handle the demands consumers have from their applications.
Besides Stream Technology Dragon would offer advantages associated with overclocking the system. According to AMD, overclocking should be very simple - even the ordinary computer user, Mr. Jensen, should now be able to enjoy the added benefit that can be squeezed out of the system in this manner. The secret behind the simple new overclocking application should be AMD Overdrive - now available in version 3.0. Phenom II is not significantly faster with standard operating frequencies, but there is much more of what AMD has dubbed headroom - the ability of a processor to operate at higher overclocked frequencies.
Back in November of last year, AMD already documented that Phenom II, even with normal air cooling, could achieve frequencies of close to 1 gigahertz above standard speeds, and with liquid nitrogen (LN2), something as extreme as 5 gigahertz or more was possible. We therefore look forward to finding out how much our Phenom II sample can be overclocked to using air, and thus give us an answer to exactly how quick AMD's new work horse can run, and not least if it will be able to match the performance of the Core i7 at those frequencies.
Before we reach that far, however, we must first look at the improvements Phenom II introduces, and evaluate upgrade perspectives that are paramount to all who are considering getting the new Phenom.
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