Nintendo hardware enthusiasts have been scouring the internet for more than two decades in search of special prototype Nintendo GameCube consoles - the Space World 2000 expo model has long been sought after by hardcore collectors. Nintendo revealed (at the time) its upcoming home console as well as the Game Boy Advance handheld system at their annual video game trade show held near Tokyo, or the company's hometown of Kyoto, Japan. Space World 2000 (Makuhari Messe, Chiba) would end up being the penultimate show, with Nintendo choosing to not continue with their regular consumer event post-2001.

Consolevariations, a gaming hardware database, this week reported via a blog post that an interesting GameCube prototype was up for sale, following a tip received on Discord, and it quickly became apparent that this slightly bashed and chipped example was indeed one of the very first models revealed to the public at Nintendo's Space World 2000 expo. Several preview units were also demoed on the showroom floor at the August 2001 event, but experts think that these were sourced from the previous year's batch.

Arm today announced the appointment of new Board members Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, chairman and CEO of XCOM Labs and former CEO and executive chairman of Qualcomm Inc., and Rosemary Schooler, former corporate vice president and general manager of Data Center and AI Sales for Intel. Both bring significant public company experience spanning technology development, business strategy and corporate governance to Arm as it continues to prepare for a public listing.

"The unique insights and depth of experience that Paul and Rosemary bring will help us expand and diversify our Board while providing enormous value to Arm at such a pivotal moment in our journey," said Rene Haas, CEO, Arm.

AMD and ATI Technologies ULC have filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) against Realtek Semiconductor and TCL Industries holdings. The complaint lists five patent infringements from both companies, mostly related to graphics technologies such as texture decompression, a unified shader approach to graphics architectures, a multi-threaded graphics processing system, as well as methods to synchronize thread wavefront data and events and a patent covering a processing unit for asynchronous dispatch.

According to AMD, both companies integrated solutions based on AMD's intellectual property without appropriate, prior licensing. The USITC has already come forward with an investigation announcement towards a number of Realtek and TCL-designed products, including graphics systems, digital televisions, and assorted components, found in some products shipped and sold in the U.S. market. The lawsuit aims for an exclusion order and cease and desist on sales of affected products.

Colorful Technology Company Limited, a professional manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards, all-in-one gaming and multimedia solutions, and high-performance storage, announces the launch of the GPU History Museum in partnership with NVIDIA. COLORFUL has recently relocated to Shenzhen New Generation Industrial Park. With that, COLORFUL is proud to announce the launch of the first GPU History Museum in China. The museum will showcase the beginnings of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), to the development and evolution of graphics cards up to the present generation.

Discovering vulnerabilities in software is not an easy thing to do. There are many use cases and states that need to be tested to see a possible vulnerability. Still, security researchers know how to find those and they usually report it to the company that made the software. Today, AMD has disclosed that there is a vulnerability present in the company graphics driver powering the GPUs and making them work on systems. Called CreateAllocation (CVE-2020-12911), the vulnerability is marked with a score of 7.1 in the CVSSv3 test results, meaning that it is not a top priority, however, it still represents a big problem.

"A denial-of-service vulnerability exists in the D3DKMTCreateAllocation handler functionality of AMD ATIKMDAG.SYS 26.20.15029.27017. A specially crafted D3DKMTCreateAllocation API request can cause an out-of-bounds read and denial of service (BSOD). This vulnerability can be triggered from a guest account, " says the report about the vulnerability. AMD states that a temporary fix is implemented by simply restarting your computer if a BSOD happens. The company also declares that "confidential information and long-term system functionality are not impacted". AMD plans to release a fix for this software problem sometime in 2021 with the new driver release. You can read more about it here.

AMD won back ownership of three graphics patents that had earlier been struck down on a complaint by LG Electronics. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overruled a ruling of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) which observed that AMD subsidiary ATI Technologies ULC (now reorganized as RTG), has a claim to U.S. patents numbered 7,742,053, 6,897,871, and 7,327,369. The three patents deal with critical technology related to Unified Shaders.

The PTAB had earlier dismissed ATI's ownership of the patents on grounds that the IP claimed was "too obvious in light of prior art." A bench of three Judges in a unanimous decision ruled that ATI had "had conceived of their inventions before the prior art." Put simply, the court was satisfied that the technologies protected by these patents were invented by ATI before the "prior art," and were not "obvious next steps" to it.

Back in the glory days of ATI Radeon, the XT brand extension denoted the better-endowed variant among two or more graphics card models based on the same silicon, such as the Radeon HD 2900 XT. After AMD's takeover, the XT, Pro, XL, and other lesser used extensions such as XTX and All-in-Wonder were retired in favor of numerical variant numbers, beginning with the HD 3870. The company continued to use "XT" and "Pro" internally to differentiate ASIC variants, although those monikers were seldom if not never used in marketing materials. That's about to change. AMD launched its first overtly XT brand-extended product in close to 15 years, with the China-specific Radeon RX 560 XT, but alas, it's a lousy re-brand.

The RX 560 XT is positioned between the RX 560 4 GB and RX 570 4 GB, and is based on the "Polaris 20" or "Polaris 30" silicon (we don't know which). AMD enabled 28 out of 36 NGCUs on this silicon, resulting in 1,792 stream processors, 112 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. The memory is 4 GB across a 256-bit wide memory interface, although the memory clock-speed is dialed down to 6.6 Gbps (211.2 GB/s). What makes the RX 560 XT a re-brand is that AMD launched an SKU with the same exact specifications, called Radeon Pro 570, and there are several odd-ball RX 570-branded cards in the wild with this core-config. There's no reference-design board of the RX 560 XT, and the SKU is entirely in the hands of board partners to come up with custom-designs of their own.

Update: AMD has informed us that the RX 560 XT is based on the 14 nm "Polaris 10" silicon, and not "Polaris 20" or "Polaris 30." Polaris 10 is the first implementation of the "Polaris" architecture.

In what is turning out to be a massive QA oversight by AMD, people who bought retail Radeon VII graphics cards report that their cards don't support UEFI, and that installing the card in their machines causes their motherboard to engage CSM (compatibility support module), a key component of UEFI firmware that's needed to boot the machine with UEFI-unaware hardware (such as old storage devices, graphics cards, NICs, etc.,).

To verify this claim, we put the stock video BIOS of our Radeon VII sample in a hex editor, and what we found out startled us. The BIOS completely lacks UEFI support, including a GOP (graphics output protocol) driver. A GOP driver is a wafer-thin display driver that runs basic display functions on your GPU during the pre-boot environment. Without UEFI support for the graphics card (i.e. with CSM running), Windows 10 cannot engage Secure Boot. Since UEFI Secure Boot is a requirement for Microsoft Windows 10 Logo certification, we are having doubts whether AMD can really claim "Windows 10 compatible" for Radeon VII, at least until a BIOS update is available.

The folks over at 3dcenter.org have compiled comprehensive historical GPU AIB market share data for our digestion. While we recently reported on Q3'16 and its comparison to the quarter before and the same period last year, this information spans a near 14 year quarter-on-quarter time frame. The compilers have quite helpfully included points of reference along the timeline which highlight the two major GPU manufacturers milestone desktop product line debuts.

It is worth noting that their exact numbers differ slightly to the ones Jon Peddie Research provided as 3dcenter have also cited the work of Mercury Research, which appears more conservative. The figures provided in their own graph split the difference between the two sources to give us a more impartial look at the market.

AMD FirePro and Radeon Pro graphics empower content creators and designers at many levels, from casual makers and students all the way up to seasoned professionals and enterprise workstation users. It's not just hardware, though, that lets professionals unleash their creativity; powerful software is critical too, and today we are introducing the first of many Radeon Pro Software releases.

The Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Driver 16.Q4 is designed to address the specific needs of enterprise users and also will support the upcoming release of AMD's next-generation of professional graphics, the Radeon Pro WX series.

Earlier this week, we heard reports of some early adopters of the 4 GB variant of AMD Radeon RX 480 claiming that their cards shipped with 8 GB of memory physically present on their cards, but their graphics card BIOS somehow prevented the GPU from addressing more than 4 GB of it. In its Reddit AMA, the company presented a vague answer to the question of whether such 4 GB cards are moddable to 8 GB by flashing it with the BIOS of the 8 GB variant, by stating that the ability to mod is restricted to review samples. This is both true and false. Short answer: retail 4 GB RX 480 can be flashed to 8 GB, and the modified card perfoms on par with the 8 GB variant.

AMD sent out review samples of the 8 GB variant, and to enable reviews to also put up reviews of the 4 GB variant, it sent a special BIOS that converts the 8 GB card to 4 GB, by reducing its address-space and memory clocks, perfectly simulating the 4 GB variant. AMD's claims of 4 GB cards with 8 GB physical memory being restricted to review samples was proven false when early adopters of retail 4 GB cards discovered eight Samsung 8 Gbit memory chips on their card amounting to 8 GB. We currently have an AIB partner-branded retail 4 GB Radeon RX 480 card which we bought online (invoice posted), and which we're using to prepare our 4 GB RX 480 review. We first discovered that our 4 GB retail card had the same exact Samsung 8x 8 Gb chips (including the same bin, specc'd for 8 Gbps) as the 8 GB card. We flashed this card with the 8 GB card's BIOS, and were successful in doing so. The trick here is to extract the BIOS of the 8 GB card with ATIFlash 2.74 and then transplanting that BIOS onto the 4 GB card. The 8 GB card BIOS image which we used, can be found here. Use at your own risk.

Today at Autodesk University 2015, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) unveiled the AMD FirePro W4300 for the best Computer-Aided Design (CAD) performance that fits both small form factor (SFF) and tower workstations. The AMD FirePro W4300 card expertly integrates a powerful GPU and 4GB of GDDR5 memory within a low-profile design for installation in SFF as well as full-sized systems. Organizations can now confidently simplify their IT management by standardizing on a single, capable professional graphics solution throughout their workstation deployment.

The AMD FirePro W4300 professional graphics card is optimized for the latest CAD applications including Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor as well as Revit, Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS and CATIA, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, and many more. Engineering professionals can efficiently work with large geometry-intense models and apply GPU-accelerated features in their projects, such as the new Order Independent Transparency (OIT) mode supported in SOLIDWORKS. Users can help increase productivity by visualizing their workflows across up to six displays, and up to 4K and 5K resolution.

In the beginning, there were NVIDIA Detonator and ATI Catalyst. Detonator made way for GeForce Software, but Catalyst pulled through for another decade. These are the brand names GPU makers use to label their drivers, because GPUs are devices that warrant frequent driver updates to keep up with new software and performance improvements. AMD, after consolidating most of its visual computing divisions into the Radeon Technologies Group under technocrat Raja Koduri, made its first major announcement, re-branding AMD Catalyst as Radeon Software. Its first release gets a special name - Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.

AMD's new nomenclature for its drivers involves firmly placing the Radeon brand name, replacing "Catalyst," followed by "software," indicating that these are not just drivers, but a suite of applications designed to give you control over your visual computing experience; with "Crimson Edition" being the major version for the year 2015-16, and 15.11 denoting November 2015, retaining the date-based version numbering scheme. These could come with extensions such as "WHQL" or "Beta." The first Crimson Edition drivers will be WHQL-signed.

It's been gloomy at the markets in the wake of the European economic crisis. This along with a revised quarterly outlook released by the company, hit AMD very hard over the past week. The AMD stock opened to a stock price of 1.87 down -0.09 or -4.59% at the time of writing this report, which sets the company's market capitalization at $1.53 billion. This is almost a quarter of what AMD paid to acquire ATI Technology, about a decade ago ($5.60 billion). Earlier this month, AMD took a steep fall of -15.59%, seeing its market cap drop by a quarter.

Intel is now worth $140.8 billion (92 times more), and NVIDIA $10.7 billion (7 times more). Among the issues affecting AMD are decline in PC sales and stiff competition. However, reasonably positive earnings put out by Intel disproves AMD's excuse that the market is to blame for bad performance, and the company could slide even further, hitting its all-time-low at the financial markets. The company will host an earnings call later today.

Since March, we've been hearing whispers that AMD could give the topmost tier SKU based on its swanky new HBM-equipped "Fiji" silicon a fancy name, just as NVIDIA names its top-dog the GTX TITAN. That name could be the AMD Radeon FURY. A similar name to the brand that launched the erstwhile ATI, with its Rage series, Radeon FURY will be AMD's (and probably the industry's) fastest GPU, and will compete with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN X.

The card itself is quite diminutive, but that's because of two reasons - with memory being moved to the GPU package, a large amount of PCB real-estate is saved, and so the card can make do with a smaller PCB; and because the rear-end of the card is where the fittings for its AIO liquid-cooling solution are located. These tubes lead to a 120 x 120 mm radiator, with a single 120 mm PWM fan. Given that such a contraption could cool the dual-GPU R9 295X2, it should be effective with the Radeon FURY, just as well. The card will draw power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs will include three DP 1.2a and one HDMI 2.0. The brand naming indicates that AMD wants to change the terms on which its top-end product competes with NVIDIA's. Low noise and high-performance will be the focus, not power draw. Nobody buys an Aventador for its MPG.

TechPowerUp released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular video hardware information and diagnostic utility. Version 0.8.2 brings with it a vast number of changes, support for new hardware, and bug-fixes. To begin with, the user-interface of GPU-Z received a major update, with the addition of a "Lookup" button that takes you to our GPU Database page corresponding to your GPU. The app can now tell you if your drivers are WHQL-signed. GPU manufacturer logos are updated.

Among the new hardware supported includes NVIDIA GeForce TITAN-X, GTX 980M, GTX 970M, GGTX 965M, GTX 845M, GTX 760 Ti OEM, GTX 660 (960 shaders), GT 705, GT 720, GT 745M, NVS 310, and Grid; AMD Radeon R9 255, FirePro W7100, HD 8370D, AMD R9 M280X, and R9 M295X; and Intel "Broadwell" integrated graphics. Specifications are revised for GeForce GTX 970.

A large number of bugs were fixed, and overall usability improved, including notably GPU-Z now supports Windows 10. We implemented a new working way of extracting BIOS from NVIDIA GPUs on systems with WIndows 8 and higher, to avoid a system hang. A large number of bugs were fixed, and overall usability of the app improved, as detailed in the change-log.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.8.2 | GPU-Z 0.8.2 ASUS ROG-themed

The Change-log follows.

With Microsoft readying a Release Preview of its upcoming Windows 8.1 operating system; AMD jumped in with a specialized Catalyst driver. Windows 8.1 features an upgraded display driver model, WDDM 1.3, which lets users take advantage of a few new features. GPUs based on AMD's Graphics CoreNext architecture will be supported by Windows 8.1 over WDDM 1.3, while older VLIW4 and VLIW5-based GPUs (Radeon HD 6000 series and older), will be supported over older WDDM 1.2 based drivers.

Windows 8.1 brings some enhancements to PC graphics, with support for Microsoft's own standardized wireless display technology; 48 Hz dynamic refresh rates for video playback, V-sync interrupt optimization, video conferencing acceleration, and a new instruction to the DirectX 11.1 API, named "tiled resources." Like the operating system itself, AMD's Windows 8.1 Preview Catalyst driver is a beta, and its use comes with no warranties. Microsoft expects to launch Windows 8.1 later this year, reportedly available as a free upgrade for current Windows 8 users.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst Windows 8.1 Preview Driver

Lists of AMD GPUs supported by WDDM 1.3 and WDDM 1.2 follow.

In its 33rd year and as Asia's largest B2B (Business to Business) computer exhibition, COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2013 is kicking off on June 4. Today, the winning list of Best Choice Award, the official award of COMPUTEX TAIPEI, is unveiled. MSI's Z87-GD65 GAMING motherboard and Funtoro HD MOD (Media on Demand) vehicle infotainment system have proudly stood out from over 400 competitions. The only Golden Award winner in the IC & Components category, the Z87-GD65 GAMING motherboard literally sparkles in every way and proves MSI to be a true pioneer of mid-range/high-end motherboards.

The Best Choice Award has always focused on Functionality, Innovation and Market Potential as the main judging guideline. Bringing the Z87-GD65 GAMING to global gaming enthusiasts' attention, the Best Choice Golden Award also highlights the industrial and official affirmation toward MSI's technical innovation and design capabilities. Specifically designed for operators and passengers of long-distance coaches and high-end tour buses, the HD MOD System integrates infotainment and telematics in one pack and is clearly the top choice for multimedia entertainment on mass transportation.

AMD today announced that Raja Koduri, 44, has rejoined the company as corporate vice president, Visual Computing, reporting to Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer. In his new role, Koduri will have overall responsibility for driving AMD's innovation in visual and accelerated computing.

"Maintaining AMD's position as a leader in visual computing is the key to our long-term success. As one of the industry's foremost experts in developing leading-edge visual computing solutions, Raja brings exceptional vision and strength to AMD's world-class engineering leadership team," said Papermaster. "Given his past record of success, Raja will help AMD lead the way in visual and accelerated computing and ensure we continue developing the industry-leading graphics IP that forms the foundation for our future growth."

You may have read our report from earlier today, covering the main points that AMD was trying to make in its recent teleconference with the European press (which includes us). While in the call, we were a little jolted by the choices of words some of AMD's executives used to describe their company's consumer graphics outlook for 2013, how they believe they can hold out for almost the entire year with little or no major updates to their product stack, and more interestingly, a few above-the-belt jabs at NVIDIA and its upcoming GeForce GTX Titan product.

The crux of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was to bust some misconceptions spread in the press over the last couple of weeks, to tell them a Graham's Number of times that they still hold the fastest single GPU on the planet, which powers the fastest graphics card there is (ASUS ARES II). The most ironic part of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was the one in which they called GeForce Titan NVIDIA's emergency/knee-jerk reaction to AMD's getting cozy with game developers, and netting some of the biggest PC game launches of the season for its Never Settle Reloaded bundle.

While digging through documentation for the latest version of AMD Display Library (ADL), we discovered evidence that AMD is working on a real GPU dynamic overclocking technology akin to NVIDIA's GPU Boost. Such a technology could manipulate GPU (and possibly memory) clock speeds, and voltages across multiple power states, taking into account processing load and temperatures. ADL allows third-party applications low-level interactions with AMD display drivers. Current generation Radeon graphics cards use Overdrive 5 and the feature-set it comes with, and so the new technology, along with Overdrive 6 could feature on upcoming generations of AMD GPUs.

Listed under Overdrive 6 capabilities, AMD documented three new definitions, one which indicates that a GPU's core/engine clock can be changed within a range (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_SCLK_CUSTOMIZATION), one that its memory clock can be changed within range (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_MCLK_CUSTOMIZATION), and one that monitors its activity/load (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_GPU_ACTIVITY_MONITOR). The three are ingredients of a dynamic OC technology in the works.

Club 3D presents today its latest addition to the Radeon HD 7000 series, the Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3 and 1GB DDR3 graphic cards. The Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3 offers an incredible amount of frame buffer for those budget minded gamers.

Both cards utilize a custom cooler design with a single slot 50mm fan that ensures the card to remain cool at 57 ⁰C on average when gaming, extending the lifespan of the card and operate stable at high speed. The HD 7750 4GB also consumes 3W less power under load and is fully powered through the PCI Express interface, meaning it does not require an external power connector, offering more compatibility with older generation power supplies. Run games at full HD by upgrading from your old onboard graphic card and boost performance by up to 7x compared to previous generation Radeon graphic cards. Add more and faster memory and enhance your internet experience, watching online video's, photo and video editing has never been this smooth and fast, experience true speed with the Club 3D Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3.

AMD is preparing to update the specifications of its Radeon HD 7950 graphics processor to make it more competitive in the sub-$400 market segment, particularly against NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 660 Ti graphics processor. The update is much like that of the Radeon HD 7750, which got its core frequency increased from 800 to 900 MHz in a specifications update. The company released a new BIOS ROM image file which works on all AMD reference design Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards, which implements the new specifications.

The new specifications sees the GPU core frequency increased to 850 MHz (from 800 MHz), and introduces PowerTune with Boost, which sends the GPU clock speed up to 925 MHz, when applications demand it. The memory frequency stays unchanged, at 1250 MHz, and so do the physical specifications of the GPU, such as stream processor, TMU, and ROP counts. All Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards manufactured from mid-August will feature the new specifications, prices will remain unchanged. If you're familiar with manually updating the BIOS, you can check it out (at your own risk) from our VGA BIOS Database. Set your card's BIOS selector switch to "1" (if available), and update the BIOS. It works only with AMD reference-design HD 7950 cards.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon HD 7950 Specifications Update BIOS

The executive overseeing Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD) relationship with videogame-console makers has left the company to join rival NVIDIA, taking with him years of experience in the competitive field. Bob Feldstein, who joined AMD when the company acquired graphics-chip maker ATI in 2006, has taken on the role of vice president of technology licensing at NVIDIA. He most recently served as AMD's corporate vice president of business development and also led the company's Boston Design Center, which focuses on design engineering for AMD's various chips.

AMD today announced immediate availability of the AMD FirePro W600 professional graphics card, the company's first professional graphics card to leverage AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture and 28nm production technology, for use in high-resolution, content-rich, multi-screen display wall environments. With this launch, AMD is addressing a growing need for large, dynamic screens that are easily updated with new content.

"Whether we are checking flight times at the airport or watching the latest ads on massive screens in city squares, digital signage has quickly become an important and ubiquitous part of our lives," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics. "To enable these displays, the digital signage industry demands technology that can be regularly refreshed with new, feature-rich content. With the launch of the AMD FirePro W600 professional graphics card, AMD is helping advance the digital display wall industry by providing suppliers and developers with impressive display density, performance and exceptional value."