Windows 7: AMD Previews New Catalyst Control Center Interface

Dave76 · 13 Dec 2010

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Back on December 2nd AMD’s Catalyst Product Manager, Terry Makedon, posted an interesting if cryptic note on his Twitter feed: “Catalyst 10.12 is going to be HUGE”. Since then there’s been some speculation on just what was going to be huge, but nothing quite hit the mark until the last couple of days.
With release date for the Catalyst 10.12 driver set finally upon us, AMD has taken the wraps off of what they’ve been up to. The huge news? The Catalyst Control Center is getting a significant interface refresh; its latest since the middle of last year, and certainly the biggest one to date.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves though, let’s start at the beginning. Catalyst Control Center, AMD’s GPU configuration control panel, is one of the last vestiges of the old ATI. Released back in 2004 to a tepid response, it has received a number of upgrades over the years (including a previous interface refresh only a year and a half ago) but is in a number of ways still the same utility since the ATI days. Going forward however, AMD has finally put the ATI brand to rest 4 years after the acquisition, and with the retirement the ATI branding those last vestiges of ATI are being modernized. In the case of the Catalyst Control Center, this means among other things replacing the red ATI livery with AMD’s green & black livery.

At the same time, Catalyst Control Center is about to become much more important. AMD purchased ATI because they foresaw the importance of having a graphics division to design GPUs for future CPU products with on-die GPUs – the newly christened APU. Work on integrating a GPU and a CPU started early so the importance of the hardware has always been self-evident, but software has been another matter. With AMD’s first APUs launching next year, the software side of the equation is finally coming together and it’s the Catalyst Control Center at the middle of it all (and the fact that we first saw the new CCC running on Zacate says a lot right there).
Going forward, the Catalyst Control Center will be AMD’s primary CPU/GPU/APU configuration utility. Today we’re just seeing the next evolution of the Catalyst Control Center as a GPU configuration utility, but next year AMD will start bringing in features for their APUs and CPUs. So in many ways this is just the first half of the story as we still don’t know just how the Catalyst Control Center will integrate CPU/APU controls, or for that matter what will become controllable.

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