The latest edition of Jon Peddie Research covering the PC graphics industry indicates that shipments of GPUs in Q1 2010 increased 44.3% over Q1 2009. There are increases in market shares of both AMD and NVIDIA, year over year, this time at the expense of Intel. The highlight for this quarter, however, has been the significant increase in market share of AMD. The company behind ATI Radeon clocked a 96.3% growth year-over-year. Despite taking a cut, Intel continues to to have the highest market share. With the introduction of Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale processors that have embedded graphics processors, JPR demarcated these into a new entry called integrated processor graphics (IPG), from chipset graphics. With the propagation of the platform, it is predicted that chipset graphics will diminish in market share.

Leading graphics supplier, SAPPHIRE Technology, has begun sampling the world's fastest graphics card, the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4G TOXIC Edition. Previewed at CeBit 2010, the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4G TOXIC Edition has 4GB of fifth generation GDDR5 memory, a total of 3200 stream processors and 160 texture units and runs with world leading clock speeds of 900MHz core and 1200MHz for memory (4.8GHz effective). This is significantly faster than the standard model, and makes the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4GB TOXIC Edition not only the fastest card in its class, but the fastest in the world.

With twice the computing power of the highly acclaimed SAPPHIRE HD 5870 Series, this new HD 5970 model shares all the exciting features of the HD 5000 family - including support for the DirectCompute 11 instruction set of Microsoft DirectX 11, hardware tessellation and multi threaded communication with the system CPU. It also enables the acceleration of applications supported by ATI Stream, and the ability to display across three monitors simultaneously with ATI Eyefinity. All of this comes with a modest active power consumption and ATI Powerplay Dynamic Power Management to achieve super-low power consumption in 2D and idle modes.

Club 3D rolled out a new silent graphics card based on the ATI Radeon HD 5550, what it calls the "Noiseless Edition". The Club 3D HD 5550 Noiseless Edition is based on the 40 nm "Redwood" GPU, packs 320 stream processors, is DirectX 11 compliant, and carries 512 MB of GDDR3 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface. The card is full-height, and its silent GPU heatsink spans across two expansion slots. The cooler is made of an aluminum fin block to which heat is conveyed by heat pipes. The GPU is clocked at 550 MHz, and memory at 1600 MHz DDR. Connectivity includes DVI-D, D-Sub, and HDMI with on-chip 7.1 HD audio with DTS, and Dolby Digital. Like every other card based on Redwood, it draws all its power from the PCI-Express slot. The Club 3D HD 5550 Noiseless Edition is expected to be priced around the $70 mark.

Sticking to its announcement, AMD released the ATI Catalyst 10.4a Preview driver suite. In the run up to Catalyst 10.4, the company wanted to quickly resolve an important issue pertaining to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 game load times, which made it release a series of preview drivers, starting with Catalyst 10.4 Preview which resolved the issue for ATI Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs, and now the Catalyst 10.4a Preview, which resolves it for ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000, HD 2000 series GPUs. With this hotfix applied, users will experience reduced map game load times on Bad Company 2. Catalyst 10.4 WHQL will be released later this month.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.4a Preview

With AMD's next generation of graphics processors, the company plans to, at one point, switch its GPU manufacturing from its present Taiwan-based foundry partners such as TSMC and UMC, to GlobalFoundaries, its erstwhile own manufacturing division. From 40 nm, graphics processors are expected to jump to 28 nm as the next manufacturing process standard. GlobalFoundries will be ready with a 28 nm High-K metal gate (HKMG) node for making AMD products which are now bulk-manufactured in Taiwan.

During a quarterly conference call with financial analysts, chief executive officer of AMD, Dirk Meyer said "The first intersection of our AMD GPUs and GlobalFoundries are on the 28nm. We haven't been public with respect to any timing there." GlobalFoundries is said to have two principal kinds of 28 nm nodes, the 28nm-HP (High Performance) node makes complex chips such as GPUs, game console chips, storage controllers, networking and media encoding, while the 28nm-SLP (Super Low Power) is used for less complex devices, particularly intended to be low-power, for portable devices, such as baseband, application processors, and other handheld functions. In 2011, AMD is expected to release its next-generation of GPUs in a series codenamed "Northern Islands".

Lenovo today is introducing a new Series of ThinkPad - the L Series. Designed for business, government and education customers, the ThinkPad L412 and L512 laptops feature high performance with the latest Intel processing technologies, military tough durability and strong web conferencing features in an affordable laptop starting under $700. Additionally, the laptops are the greenest on the market by integrating the highest amounts of post consumer recycled content.

The laptops come with technologies students and employees need to be productive in their daily work, like:

• Choices of the latest Intel Core i3 and i5 processors with Turbo Boost and Hyperthreading technologies
• 16:9 HD antiglare displays on the 14-inch L412 and 15-inch L512
• Choices of Intel integrated or ATI Mobility Radeon graphics
• 3G/4G wireless connectivity options with Gobi 2000 module support for AT&T, Sprint and Verizon
• Multitouch touchpads
• Up to 8 hours of battery life
• Expansion with 4 USB ports/1 powered, combo eSATA/USB port, support for DisplayPort and VGA
• Windows 7 with Lenovo Enhanced Experience featuring up to 57% faster bootup and shutdown

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, announces the ultimate factory overclocked HD5870: PCS++ HD5870. For the first time, PowerColor's PCS++ series equips the HD5870 with additional factory overclocking, presenting performance unlike any other out-of-the-box experience from a HD 5870.

Equipped with a 92mm cooling fan and 4 pure core heat pipes, the PCS cooling system can easily dissipate heat from cooper base at a lower fan speed, efficiently cooling down the temperature by up to 15°C, when compared to reference board designs and in a low-noise setting, under 30dB.

AMD released the ATI Catalyst 10.4 Preview driver suite. The driver builds on the feature-set of Catalyst 10.3, but packs a hotfix addressing an issue users of the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series are facing with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 regarding slow map load times. The new drivers reduce map load times. For users of Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and older GPUs, ATI assured that it will release a preview driver that does the same in a few days from now. The driver will be called Catalyst 10.4a. The release notes for these drivers along with a full list of changes for Catalyst 10.4 will be published when the company releases the WHQL-signed version later this month.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.4 Preview for Radeon HD 5000 Series

AMD announced today the launch of the first of a new family of ATI FirePro professional graphics solutions with ATI Eyefinity technology, delivering clear performance advances and productivity leadership. The ATI FirePro V8800-the industry's most powerful professional graphics card ever created and the only professional graphics solution in the world supporting ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology and Microsoft DirectX 11 technology-is available for order today from AMD and its technology partners.

"AMD is the undisputed consumer graphics leader and today we're bringing many of the same cutting edge innovations from our ATI Radeon HD 5000 series to the professional graphics market for the first time. The ATI FirePro V8800 with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology effectively dissolves visual limitations for professionals," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. "Our ecosystem has never been stronger as we're actively working with leading ISVs and OEMs on a global scale to offer unprecedented choice and advanced performance for handling today's modern workloads. We're confident the latest family of ATI FirePro professional graphics brings new value to the workstation graphics market."

NVIDIA's CUDA GPU compute API could be making its way to practically every PC, with an NVIDIA GPU in place, or not. A chinese freelance developer has coded a means to get CUDA work as a middleware on OpenCL. This move lets CUDA work on ATI Radeon GPUs that support OpenCL, as well as x86 CPUs, since OpenCL specs allow the API to run on CPUs for development purposes. The implications of these are many:

• Letting CUDA-accelerated software such as Badaboom make use of ATI GPUs
• Letting PhysX run on ATI GPUs as PhysX middleware uses CUDA for GPU acceleration
• Possibly better scaling of PhysX on multi-core CPUs (over OpenCL), as the regular PhysX CPU acceleration is infamous for bad multi-core scaling in performance

The software works as a translation layer, exchanging calls between CUDA and OpenCL or the CPU if OpenCL is not available. It comes in the form of a loader application that injects itself into the executing process. To get PhysX to run, one needs to install older versions of PhysX System Software (version 8.09.04 WHQL being the latest) from its standalone installer (installs PhysX libraries without looking for NVIDIA GPUs).

DOWNLOAD: CUDA Emulator Loader

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced an exciting new version of the highly acclaimed HD 5870 PC graphics accelerator featuring six outputs allowing six monitors to be used simultaneously - and supporting a variety of SLS configurations with ATI Eyefinity. The new SAPPHIRE HD 5870 Eyefinity6 edition is a 3D graphics accelerator with a single GPU and six mini Displayport outputs on the bracket. Any or all of these outputs can be connected to Displayport compatible monitors to give a choice of Eyefinity configurations to maximise gaming experience, enlarge work area for increased productivity or configure display areas for information or multimedia systems. The Eyefinity6 Edition is the first and only card in its class to support six monitors from a single graphics processor and delivers a stunning visual experience.

All of the SAPPHIRE HD 5870 series cards are based on the latest graphics architecture from the ATI division of AMD, the second generation of GPU to be built in its 40nm process. The first two Displayport outputs on the HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition can also be used with passive Displayport to DVI or Displayport to HDMI adapters (supplied) to connect alternative displays, including full support for audio over HDMI. The additional four ports can be connected to other displays using active adapters as an alternative to being connected directly to Displayport monitors.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today announces the first graphics solution which can support up to 6 monitors: the HD5870 Eyefinity 6. The HD5870 Eyefinity 6 features multi-display Eyefinity technology, enables up to six monitors to be operated from one card through its six mini displayport onboard design. This unique feature allows gamers to expand real estate and delivers incredible HD gaming.

The HD5870 Eyefinity 6 has an unparalleled 1600 stream processors and equipped with 2GB onboard memory, clocks in at 850MHz core speed and 1200MHz of memory speed, easily boosting PC's with nearly 3 teraFLOPs of computing power. It delivers the intense gaming performance and unrivaled image quality with lifelike 3D visual effects.

Harnessing the world's most powerful graphics processor, AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition graphics card. Equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 is the first graphics card capable of rendering in excess of 1 billion pixels per second in today's titles, unleashing PC game environments of unprecedented size and resolution. Enthusiast gamers now have access to a seamless, stunning perspective across six displays, enabling up to 12 times more resolution than 1080p HD.

"The ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition graphics card opens the door to a new era in personal computing," said Matt Skynner, vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics Division. "With the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition, PC users get the ultimate panoramic computing experience in one powerful card. By bridging the innovation in ATI Eyefinity technology with broad ecosystem support, AMD is revolutionizing the PC visual experience."

Today HIS unleashes the revolutionary new HIS Radeon HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 Eyefinity 6 Edition. Start experiencing DirectX 11 gaming and HD entertainment with stunning ATI Eyefinity 6 displays capabilities, which delivers incredible scalability, productivity and immersive HD gaming performance.

Powered by the top-of-the-line 5870 GPU, HIS Radeon HD 5870 2GB GDDR5 accelerates PC gaming with up to 2.72 teraFLOPS computing power. Running at 850MHz core clock speed and 4.8Gbps memory clock speed, the, HIS Radeon HD 5870 ensure extreme game play at high resolutions and maximum settings. What's more? The immersive HD gaming experience is brought the next level by ATI Eyefinity6 Technology. This revolutionary multi-display technology allows you to expand your visual real estate across up to 6 displays with innovative "warp around" capabilities to maximum your field of view with incredible sharpness and clarity.

Club 3D released a new custom-design graphics card based on the ATI Radeon HD 5830 GPU, which comes overclocked out of the box. The card has clock speeds of 825 MHz (core) and 1050 MHz (memory, 4200 MHz effective), against reference speeds of 800/1000 MHz. The HD 5830 GPU packs 1120 stream processors, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface to connect to 1 GB of memory. Connectivity includes one each of DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Club 3D did not disclose price, though we expect it to be a little over the base-model cards, around the US $240 mark.

Shortly after the Khronos group announced the OpenGL 4.0, the newest version of the multi-platform graphics API, AMD is out with a preview graphics driver for its ATI Radeon, FireGL, FirePro, and Mobility Radeon graphics accelerators, which includes the OpenGL 4.0 ICD (installable client driver). The driver is available for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Linux. OpenGL 4.0 is comparable and up to times with Microsoft's DirectX 11 API, it makes use of hardware features such as tessellation on the GPU, per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions, 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations, etc., and has no restrictions on which later version of Windows it can run on. With OpenGL 4.0 for example, one can expect 3D graphics with the complexity comparable to DirectX 11 on Windows XP.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst OpenGL 4.0 Preview Driver for Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP, and Linux.

AMD released the ATI Catalyst 10.3 WHQL driver suite. Catalyst provides drivers and related system software for ATI Radeon, ATI FirePro, graphics processors, AMD 7-series and 8-series integrated graphics, AMD chipset system software, and drivers for ATI multimedia products. Version 10.3, like 10.2 promises to bring a series of significant additions to the feature-set, along with a long list of application-specific performance improvements.

Catalyst 10.3 introduces a set of additions to the ATI Eyefinity technology, such as display bezel compensation, per-display colour adjustments, multiple Eyefinity groups (which allows multiple Eyefinity display heads over available graphics cards and displays), and improvements to the display configuration switching. ATI hardware now supports stereoscopic 3D display over third-party middleware from the likes of iZ3D, DDD, etc., for output of stereoscopic L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye). A number of bugs were also fixed. For more details refer to the Release Notes document.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.3 for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

Game-specific performance increment figures follow.

HP today unveiled workstation offerings that include the first small form factor workstation to be available in every region of the world, multicore processor updates to its Z Workstation series and a mobile workstation with DreamColor display technology.

Adding to the award-winning HP Z Workstation series, the HP Z200 SFF Workstation delivers workstation performance and reliability in a sleek, ultracompact and affordable package, and is a great choice for space-constrained environments including the health care, engineering, education, financial and original equipment manufacturer markets.

MSI, the world-leading manufacturer of mainboards and graphics cards, today launched the R5870/R5850 Twin Frozr II, the latest in the Twin Frozr series of graphics display adaptors designed for outstanding cooling performance that have won praise from the media. In addition to the latest technologies such as ATI Stream, Eyefinity and DX11, which are supported by the standard ATI Radeon HD5870 and HD5850 GPUs, the new models have also inherited MSI's technical excellence in thermal design.

Not only are R5870/R5850 Twin Frozr II equipped with military class components where it matters the most, the new models have also adopted a powerful cooling device designed for Twin Frozr II - dual 8-cm PWM fans and dual 8-mm SuperPipe technology for an even more outstanding thermal design, all the while maintaining low-noise performance during operation. These are products that should not be missed by consumers who value both performance and silence.

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced a new version of its successful HD SAPPHIRE HD 5850 TOXIC Edition with a larger frame buffer size of 2GB. The SAPPHIRE HD 5850 TOXIC series are SAPPHIRE original designs based on the latest 40nm graphics architecture from the ATI division of AMD. They feature 1440 stream processors and 72 texture units delivering the fastest performance in class as well as supporting ATI Stream technology.

Designed for the enthusiast or demanding user, the SAPPHIRE HD 5850 2G TOXIC Edition is factory overclocked to 765MHz core and has 2GB of high speed DDR5 memory clocked at 1125MHz (4500MHz effective). SAPPHIRE's World leading Vapor-X technology not only allows the cards to run as much as 15 degrees C cooler and 10dB quieter than the standard models, it provides additional headroom for further performance tuning (overclocking).

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today introduces the first and only graphics solution on the planet: the HD5770 Eyefinity 5. The HD5770 Eyefinity 5 features multi-display eyefinity technology, enables up to 5 monitors to be operated from one card through its five mini displayport onboard design. Gamers can easily make use of this unique feature and have different display configurations to enjoy a wider field of view and get more done at the same time.

This unparalleled graphics solution takes advantage of the HD5770 series features, clocking in at 850 MHz core speed and 1200MHz memory speed, the card is ready to tackle all the latest game titles and enable a superior gaming experience. With support for Microsoft's DirectX 11, the HD5770 Eyefinity 5 provides the most vivid gaming experience like never before. Compatible with ATI Stream technology, the card enables demanding data parallel compute tasks from the CPU to GPU, accelerating daily applications.

AMD today announced that, along with partners Pixelux Entertainment and Bullet Physics, it has added significant support to the Open Physics ecosystem by providing game developers with access to the newest version of the Pixelux Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), a breakthrough in physics simulation. In addition, to enabling a superior development experience and helping to reduce time to market, Pixelux has tightly integrated its technology, DMM, with Bullet Physics, allowing developers to integrate physics simulation into game titles that run on both OpenCL- and DirectCompute-capable platforms. And both DMM and Bullet work with Trinigy's Vision Engine to create and visualize physics offerings in-game.

"Establishing an open and affordable physics development environment is an important accomplishment for both game developers and gamers, signaling a move away from exclusionary or proprietary approaches," said Eric Demers, chief technology officer, AMD Graphics Division. "Not only does the integration of Bullet Physics into partner middleware help drive broader adoption of physics in games, it ensures that when those games are released, all gamers, regardless of the hardware in their PC, can benefit from the more realistic experience enabled by those effects."

It looks like Sapphire and ASUS will not be the only AMD board partners out with a custom design Radeon HD 5970 graphics accelerator that has higher clock speeds and twice the amount of memory. XFX seems just about ready with what it calls the XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition 4GB. This limited edition graphics card borrows heavily from AMD's reference design, but adds some changes:

• The leaf-blower is centrally located, with a GPU system on its either sides.
• GPUs use higher clock speeds of 850 MHz (core), 1200 MHz (memory).
• Twice the amount of memory, 2 GB per GPU, 4 GB total.
• ATI Eyefinity6 display output configuration: 6 mini-DisplayPort connectors to support six physical displays (dongles may be included for DVI users).
• Power is drawn from two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors.

XFX may manufacture upto 1500 pieces in all, and could price each piece around US $1000, with sales starting later this month.

Today, HP introduced its first multitouch-enabled tablet for business users as well as notebook PCs tailored for both enterprise and small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The HP EliteBook 2740p starts at 1.73kg and includes a 12.1-inch diagonal LED display or optional outdoor-view display with less reflection and a higher contrast for easier viewing in natural light. The touchscreen option allows users to get work done more intuitively and faster based on their choice of input methods. Multitouch gestures, finger taps and swipes across the screen allow users to navigate through applications and menus, as well provide access to information and websites.

The HP EliteBook 2740p offers a variety of battery solutions for lightweight configurations, including a six-cell li-ion prismatic battery, which provides up to 5 hours of uptime, and an optional HP 2700 Ultra-Slim Battery that provides up to 11 hours when combined with the standard battery.

Without making much noise, HIS released a custom-design ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card with its coveted IceQ moniker. The HIS HD 5770 IceQ 5 graphics card comes months after the company released the HD 5750 IceQ. The two differ in design and features sharply. The HD 5770 IceQ 5 features a longer PCB, a more complex cooling unit that makes use of 8 mm thick heatpipes (earlier used for HD 4870 based cards), 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, and reference clock speeds of 850 MHz (core) and 1200 MHz (memory). A "Turbo" variant that comes with higher clock speeds out of the box cannot be ruled out at this point. The Radeon HD 5770 features DirectX 11 support, has 800 stream processors, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The IceQ family of graphics cards from HIS are known for higher cooling performance, and are usually quieter. The PCB is characteristically blue, and the cooler-shroud is reactive to UV case lighting. Pricing and availability are not known as yet.