The latest chipset from AMD for its Socket AM2 platform is called AMD 690G and it doesn’t just support the latest Athlon processors but also has an integrated graphics circuit in the form of Radeon X1250. Most AMD 690G motherboards are designed for small multimedia systems and the most important feature is then the integrated graphics circuit and its capabilities of handling video playback and HD video signals. Through the Radeon X1250 circuit’s AVIVO technology there is potential, but AMD hasn’t been able to tame and control all of the power, until now. At ChileHardware they’ve published information about a BIOS update for the AMD 690G chipset that improve the performance significantly during HD DVD playback.
When playing a 1080p MPEG2 video you required a 2.8GHz processor for flawless playback. With the new BIOS update the requirement has been lowered to 1.8GHz, a pretty significant difference.
A lot of the improved performance comes from a better memory handling, but the question is if the AVIVO support has been tweaked as well. Anyway, it seems that AMD 690G will be considerably better suited for HTPC work.
