A Look at Steam's Hardware Survey for July 2012

You might recall that a few months ago, we planned to begin taking a look at hardware statistics that Valve updates each month. Not long after, the company up-ended all of its previous results due to inaccuracies caused by certain bugs. The most up-to-date hardware survey does put us back on the right track, however, so now is a great time to take a look at things again from a fresh perspective.

Starting from the top, NVIDIA holds the #1 spot for GPU usage, snagging 46.52%, while AMD settles for second with 35.53%. Since February 2011, Intel's usage has seen a dramatic rise, currently sitting at 11.61%. The most popular GPU at the moment? Where DX 11 OS + GPU is concerned, that's NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti, with 2.99% (granted, small, but there are a ton of configurations here). Second place is NVIDIA's GTX 460, at 2.13%, while third is AMD's Radeon HD 5770 at 2.00%. Given the massive number of DX11 GPUs available, the majority of the results in this category sit under 1%.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Intel dominates the CPU side of things, commanding a 72.19% marketshare; AMD holds the other 27.81%. Of all these CPUs, 38.70% of users are equipped with a quad-core, while 49.64% have a dual-core. Interestingly, 2.5% have at least a six-core, a figure I admit is a bit higher than I would have expected.

One figure that might strike you is that the majority of people on Steam are equipped with 5GB+ of RAM, at 32.83%. Another 40% is shared between 3GB and 4GB configurations. For storage space, the most popular setup ranges from 250-499GB, at 35.42%. 19.99% have more than 1TB. Unfortunately, Valve doesn't seem too intent on fine-tuning these values even more, since by today's standards, 1TB is rather modest. It'd really be interesting to see true values.

As I mentioned in our last post, one of the results that impressed me most was that the majority of Steam gamers use a 1080p resolution, a definite sweet spot. Currently, 29.11% have that, while 18.97% have 1366x768 (thanks to notebooks, I'm sure), and 10.48% have 1280x1024. The remaining % points are spanned across every other resolution imaginable.

Wrapping things up, where do OSes stand? No surprise, Windows 7 x64 is the most popular, with a 58.13% share, while the 32-bit variant holds 15.26%. Windows XP usage is beginning to verge on nonexistence, as both 32-bit and 64-bit versions hold just about 15% (what a stark contrast to two years ago!). Another 11% are still sticking by Vista's side.

For even more stats, be sure to check out the latest update on the Steam site, and as a friendly reminder, don't forgot to join our Steam group while there!

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AMD to launch Trinity desktop APUs on the 1st October?

AMD Trinity Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) for desktop socket FM2 are expected to be made available to retail on 1st October according to a rumour/report published on Japanese website Hermitage Akihabara. The website has pictures of the APUs and a feature and information chart of the APU key specifications. All these 32nm A-series APUs feature the “Piledriver” CPU architecture and integrated Radeon HD7000 series graphics.

A6-5400K

(2 cores / 3.6GHz/turbo 3.8GHz/1MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7540D graphics/OPN AD540KOKA23HJ)

A8-5500

(4 cores / 3.2GHz/ turbo 3.7GHz/4MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7560D graphics /OPN AD5500OKA44HJ)

A8-5600K

(4 cores / 3.6GHz/ turbo 3.9GHz/4MB L2/TDP 100W/HD 7560D graphics /OPN AD560KWOA44HJ)

A10-5700

(4 cores / 3.4GHz/ turbo 4.0GHz/4MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7660D graphics /OPN AD5700OKA44HJ)

A10-5800K

(4 cores / 3.8GHz/ turbo 4.2GHz/4MB L2/TDP 100W/HD 7660D graphics /OPN AD580KWOA44HJ)

Enthusiasts have been waiting for quite a long time to get their hands on desktop Trinity APUs. The mobile Trinity chips were launched in May, meanwhile desktop Trinity APUs announced in June have only trickled onto the market built into machines made by OEMs like HP and ASUS. Architectural improvements within the new Trinity APU are supposed to produce a 25 to 50 per cent performance boost over their Llano predecessors.

Japanese tech website Hermitage Akihabara managed to photograph five of the A-series 5000-family APUs revealing the OPN codes, showing the processors to be “production ready”. The APUs are shown to be in the FM2 socket format. The chart above shows the base frequency and the Turbo Core frequency alongside other useful info such as L2 cache, number of cores, TDP and Radeon graphics chip. An article about the launch rumour published on CPU-World says the APUs in the above chart with the “K” suffix are supplied multiplier unlocked.

Only this single source features the rumoured release date of 1st October whereas other CPU focused websites estimated a late October launch for the new range of AMD Trinity desktop APUs.

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AMD A10-4600M(Trinity) high-end processors AMD

While Intel is currently dominating the high-end processors AMD has been successful on another front with their low power APUs; processors with graphics built-in. The APUs have been especially popular on notebooks as they offer a lot of performance per watt and even come with decent graphics capabilities built in.

Today AMD is presenting the next generation APUs: Trinity, also called 2012 A-series APUs. The goal with this generation of APU’s is to offer more performance, better media capabilities, better game performance and all that while still offer long battery life.

FEATURE OVERVIEW

If we compare Trinity with Llano we notice that the chip is slightly larger and has a few more transistors.

The 2012 A-Series mobile APUs will be available in various configurations from dual core up to quad core with a 17”, 25” and 35 W TDP design. The 17W APU will be half as power hungry as the best Llano APU, making it ideal for the new small thin Ultrathin notebooks that AMD want to sell.  The “Piledriver”-cores are derived from the Bulldozer architecture.

3rd generation AMD Turbo Core technology makes sure that the power is automatically shifted between the CPU and GPU depending on application needs.

The APU now supports DDR3-1600 as well as low power 1.25V DIMMS. The ISA instruction sets have added support for the FMA3 and F16C instruction sets in addition to AVX, AVX 1.1, and AES.

Inside the APU we find a “Northern Island” HD74/5/600-based GPU (codename Thames), which comes with enhanced DX11-support and other improvements like an improved tessellation unit.  The GPU-core can be combined with an discrete card giving us Crossfire-support in a notebook.

One cool new feature is the fact that the APU now supports DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort 1.2 and that together in Eyefinity meaning that a notebook now could support up to 4 screens.

MEDIA SUPPORT

The 2012 A-Series mobile APUs now comes with something called AMD HD Media Accelerator.  The AMD HD Media Accelerator will take advantage of new hardware assisted video conversion using the new AMD Accelerated Video Converter. The new AMD Accelerated Video Converter block supports multi- stream H.264 HD encoding, video quality optimizations and numerous interfacing features to support video conferencing and wireless display capabilities.

One slightly weird feature is that there will be plugins available for all major browsers that incorporates AMDs Steady Video feature that stabilizes shaky video. We are not sure we really want our Youtube-video to be stabilized instead of being shown as intended but it will be there if you need it.

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AMD R-464L, AMD R-272F APU Vs i7-2710QE

Here is the first benchmark about the next AMD APUs products with "Trinity" core inside, AMD will release new APUs products based on the new "Trinity" SKU core with a lower power consumption and will be branded as "R-Series", expecting that it will be similar to mobile "Trinity" editions.

A PDF file leaked on AMD website show an interesting comparison between the Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel and the new AMD R-464L, AMD R-272F, according to external resources, the AMD R-464L specifications are 4 cores, which clocked at 2.3 GHz, and using an HD 7660G GPU requiring 35 Watt TDP to run stable, based on these number the new AMD R-464L can be a rebrand of the mobile A10-4600M chip, the R-272F APU can be a dual-core one and use a lower GPU.

Moving to the benchmark result, the snapshot show that the AMD R-464L perform 106% faster than Intel i7-2710QE sandy bridge based CPU which use the Intel graphics HD 3000, and the AMD R-272F is 45% faster when using graphics applications, and even when compared with the new intel graphic HD 4000, the AMD R-464L could easily win,

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