AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the AMD FirePro M4100 professional graphics, on mobile workstations such as the HP ZBook 14 giving outstanding OpenCL performance powered by award-winning AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The new thin and light mobile workstation with an optional touch screen interface is ideal for product development, mechanical computer-aided design (CAD) and engineering, as well as for artists, video editors, photographers and designers -- a wide set of users of professional applications who require true mobility.

"Together, AMD and HP offer workstation users industry-leading technologies in a portable design that deliver users next-generation, powerful mobile graphics processors for exceptional workstation performance," said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, Professional Graphics at AMD. "Designed for the enhancements of Windows 8, the new HP mobile workstation combines with AMD FirePro M4100 to deliver superb workstation functionality on the go."

Samsung is going into IFA 2013 with a gargantuan lineup of displays and consumer electronics, two of which are bound to grab eyeballs by the bunch. The first of the two is a 31.5-inch ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixels native resolution) PC monitor. Given its only other known specification, it will be geared more toward graphics professionals, than gamers. The display is said to offer 99 percent coverage of Adobe RGB colorspace. The other big (literally) display product on Samsung's booth will be a huge 98-inch video-wall, which is also ultra HD-capable. Video walls make for good commercial boards.

HP today announced the first professional monitors of the new Z Display family as well as new entry-level Z Workstations that offer reliable and flexible workstation performance at PC-like prices. HP is continuing to drive innovation across an evolving workplace with the introduction of the HP Z22i, Z23i and Z24i IPS Displays. Offering outstanding image accuracy and mission-critical reliability, the HP Z Displays are optimized for use with HP Z Workstations. HP Z Displays are ideal for engineers, architects, designers and photographers who require image accuracy at an affordable price.

Building upon HP's award-winning Z series of workstations, the new HP Z230 Workstation, available in a tower or small form factor (SFF), is built for demanding application workloads. The HP Z230 is a great choice for knowledge workers and specialists, design engineers and creative designers who require rock-solid reliability at an affordable price. Designers using applications like Autodesk AutoCAD and photographers using Adobe Photoshop will benefit from the new functionality of the HP Z230.
"Our customers want products that are designed and engineered to meet the most demanding computing and visualization needs, and HP's Z moniker has become synonymous with meeting that challenge," said Jeff Wood, vice president, Worldwide Product Management, Commercial Solutions Business Unit, HP. "The new HP Z230 Workstations and Z Displays meet these workload demands at an affordable price, and demonstrate HP's leadership in providing solutions for professional solutions at all levels."

After a successful collaboration with AMD over the past two years to leverage open standards to drive amazing quality, scalability, and performance for our customers - Adobe has just released Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Now users can get the production releases of these flagship products which have been optimized to the massive compute power of AMD APUs, AMD Radeon HD graphics and AMD FirePro professional graphics to enable GPU-accelerated performance across a broad range of form factors through the OpenGL and OpenCL open standards. As highlighted in recent blogs, these optimizations are significant because, not only do they result in faster final render times, but more importantly, they enable users to apply effects and preview their edits in real-time, enabling greater productivity. This is great news for end-users everywhere, who now have unprecedented choice in using the hardware that best suits their needs. AMD-based systems coupled with Adobe's shift to the affordable and innovative Adobe Creative Cloud model for managing licenses and software updates can now put these latest Adobe creative tools in the hands of more users than ever.

NVIDIA today announced that it is unleashing the full graphics potential of enterprise desktop virtualization with the availability of NVIDIA GRID vGPU integrated into Citrix XenDesktop 7. NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology addresses a challenge that has grown in recent years with the rise of employees using their own notebooks and portable devices for work. These workers have increasingly relied on desktop virtualization technologies for anytime access to computing resources, but until now this was generally used for the more standard enterprise applications. Performance and compatibility constraints had made it difficult for applications such as building information management (BIM), product-lifecycle management (PLM) and video-photo editing.

Two decades ago hardware-based graphics replaced software emulation. Desktop virtualization solutions stood alone as the only modern computing form without dedicated graphics hardware. As a result, an already busy virtualized CPU limited performance and software emulation hampered application compatibility. The situation began to improve a year ago with the introduction of the non-virtualized GPU in Citrix XenServer. But efficiency gains were limited because each user still required a dedicated GPU.

AMD today announced at Adobe MAX new and improved accelerated features for Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC. The introduction of the all-new Smart Sharpen feature and recently updated Blur Gallery and Liquify effects reinforces the collaboration between Adobe and AMD to provide high-quality, impressive performance to creative professionals everywhere by fully tapping into AMD compute and graphics processing leadership through cross-platform open standards like OpenCL and OpenGL.

"AMD and Adobe are working together to help provide powerful solutions that enable creative professionals to speed workflows and increase throughput, boost productivity and creativity, and fully realize their creative vision," says Neal Robison, senior director, Software Alliances at AMD. "AMD APUs and graphics coupled with Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC push the boundaries of what's possible and help artists of virtually all talents and disciplines make the imagined real."

NVIDIA today introduced the industry's first visual computing appliance -- enabling businesses to deliver ultra-fast GPU performance to any Windows, Linux or Mac client on their network.

The NVIDIA GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) is a powerful GPU-based system that runs complex applications such as those from Adobe Systems Incorporated, Autodesk and Dassault Systèmes, and sends their graphics output over the network to be displayed on a client computer. This remote GPU acceleration gives users the same rich graphics experience they would get from an expensive, dedicated PC under their desk.

ASUS announced a pair of new monitors addressing different segments of the market, the PA248QJ for creative professionals, and the VG27AH for gamers. The 24-inch PA248QJ provides a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, and packs a high-grade IPS LCD panel with 10-bit color resolution, high coverage of Adobe RGB palette, 6 ms response time, 300 cd/m² brightness, 1000:1 static and 8000:1 ASCR contrast ratios, and a range of inputs including DisplayPort, DVI, and HDMI. The monitor also includes a 4-port USB 3.0 hub. Moving on, the VG27AH is a 27-inch display with 1920 x 1080 pixels native resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate, 5 ms response time, IPS LCD panel with 178-degree V/H viewing angles, 250 cd/m² brightness, 80000000:1 ASCR, and a variety of 3D display features.

Genius today announces the PenSketch M912A. A 9" x 12" graphics-design tablet, the PenSketch M912A allows 3D designers as well as doodlers to create, paint, and draw effortlessly on their PC or Mac with help from the bundled Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and Corel Painter Essentials 4 software.

The large contact area and palm rest make it suitable for 3D artist or amateurs to comfortably use Genius' PenSketch M912A for extended periods of time. The 5120 LPI high-resolution contact area lets users make finely detailed sketches and designs.

AVADirect, a leading provider of custom computer systems, offers the first personal supercomputer workstation with Dual 8-Core Xeon CPUs, 192GB Memory and Four Graphics Cards. Because of the close partnership with EVGA, AVADirect now offers ground breaking capabilities based on new EVGA SR-X motherboard with wide variety of component combinations to meet the needs of the most demanding professionals or enthusiasts.

Within the past month, manufacturers began to release new motherboards based on the E5 2600 XEON processors. End-users have seen them offered in rackmount and tower configurations from Supermicro, Asus, and Intel. Now, AVADirect is proud to announce that EVGA has released an enthusiast series motherboard that AVADirect offers in a custom configuration. Supported by the EVGA Classified SR-X dual-socket 2011 motherboard, the configuration boasts a whole new level of performance and expandability, including 7x PCI e expansion slots (with PCI-E 16x 3.0 support), 6x USB 3.0 ports, and 8x internal SATA ports; 4 being SATA III 6Gb/s. More importantly, the system will support up to 192GB of certified, Quad-Channel ECC RAM.

Genius today releases its EasyPen M610XA. This graphics-design tablet with a 6" x 10" working area is bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and Corel Painter Essentials 4 making it easy to quickly and professionally edit photos and create digital artwork.

The EasyPen M610XA connects to notebooks and computers through one USB port and is extremely accurate with 4000 LPI and a report rate per second (RPS) of 200. The included cordless stylus is pressure sensitive with 1024 pressure levels, making brush strokes thicker or thinner depending on how hard the stylus is pressed and mimics traditional painting. This high-performance stylus also doubles as a mouse. A left-click is achieved by simply pushing down on the stylus. A right-click button and a scroll button near the tip of the stylus lets it easily double as a mouse.

Lenovo today announced the Lenovo ThinkStation E31, an entry-level workstation for professionals requiring a powerful desktop workstation within a PC budget. Offered as a mini-tower or small form factor (SFF) both include choices of the latest speedy Intel Xeon Processor E3 along with enhanced memory performance and graphics capabilities.

"The ThinkStation E31 an ideal choice for small-to-medium businesses or professionals that need more power and performance than they are getting out of their desktop computer," said Robert Herman, director of product and vertical solutions, Workstation Business Unit, Lenovo. "We have worked closely with customers to figure out how to deliver compact design, reliable hardware components and comprehensive support for the latest ISV applications to meet their needs. The ThinkStation E31 offers businesses a powerful way to get more from their business applications without breaking the bank."

NVIDIA today announced that LLVM, one of the industry's most popular open source compilers, now supports NVIDIA GPUs, dramatically expanding the range of researchers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and programming languages that can take advantage of the benefits of GPU acceleration.

LLVM is a widely used open source compiler infrastructure, with a modular design that makes it easy to add support for programming languages and processor architectures. The CUDA compiler provides C, C++ and Fortran support for accelerating application using the massively parallel NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has worked with LLVM developers to provide the CUDA compiler source code changes to the LLVM core and parallel thread execution backend. As a result, programmers can develop applications for GPU accelerators using a broader selection of programming languages, making GPU computing more accessible and pervasive than ever before.

AMD today announced a collaboration with Adobe Systems Incorporated to optimize a new set of GPU-accelerated features for Adobe products including the newly announced Adobe Photoshop CS6. Implementing GPU acceleration and incorporating OpenCL optimization improves the end-user experience by dramatically speeding up critical imaging features and generating real-time results when editing with key tools in Adobe Creative Suite 6.

"AMD brings its expertise in GPU and APU compute in the latest release of Adobe Creative Suite," said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. "This technology integration allows us to provide creative professionals with exciting new creative options and lightning-fast performance."

Ethisphere released its latest list of World's Most Ethical (WME) companies. The list honors companies for ethical practices. In its own words, Ethisphere defines WME companies as "companies that truly go beyond making statements about doing business "ethically" and translate those words into action. WME honorees not only promote ethical business standards and practices internally, they exceed legal compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by introducing best practices today."

Sorted by industry, you will find two short sections covering computer hardware and computer software. Under the hardware section, Intel Corporation is the only other honoree than Hitachi Data Systems. Microsoft and Adobe are honorees as some of the most ethical computer software companies. Find the complete list (sorted by industry) here.

Adobe is working on a new sandboxed version of the Flash Player browser plugin for Firefox. The move will make it tougher to compromise a system's security using malicious Shockwave Flash objects. The new plugin for Firefox (and other browsers like Opera, which rely on the common Netscape Plugin Wrapper model of browser plugins), will work essentially similar to the Flash Player Google Chrome ships with, which works in a "Protected Mode". When "sandboxed" Shockwave Flash objects in webpages will work as separate processes, with much lower privileges than the actual user, the user's machine environment will be kept abstract to it. Adobe has already redesigned the browser plugin of its Reader X (PDF viewer) to work this way, and hasn't seen a significant successful exploit since November, last year.

VR-Zone have been having a little chat with Intel 'sources', who have leaked some juicy tidbits for us to enjoy in the form performance and power news. The upcoming next generation Medfield platform is Intel's first true System on a Chip (SoC) and is designed to compete with various low power ARM offerings in the tablet space. To help achieve this, they've gone through an internal restructure, merging four business units into just one: Ultra-Mobility, Mobile Wireless, Mobile Communications and Netbook & Tablet PC. The business unit is now simply known as Mobile and Communications. It's being run by Mike Bell and Hermann Eul and the first product to emerge from it will be is the 32 nm Medfield SoC solution.

VR-Zone explained that the competition will be "Apple's A-Series, NVIDIA Tegra, Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos, Texas Instruments OMAP and the likes. Out of all the chips mentioned above, only Samsung's Exynos is currently manufactured in 32nm process, just like Medfield."

NVIDIA announced today that it has named Rob Burgess, a veteran technology executive and independent consultant, to its board of directors. Burgess, age 53, served as chief executive officer of Macromedia, Inc., a provider of Internet and multimedia software, from 1996 to 2005, and as the company's chairman or executive chairman from 1998 to 2005, when it was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc. He has been a member of Adobe's board since then, and has served since 2010 as a director of IMRIS Inc., a provider of image-guided therapy solutions.

When webpages weren't much more than text and images peppered with hyperlinks, and when animated elements were limited to slideshow-like animations by Compuserve GIF, Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) transformed the web, making it visually engaging. Even PCs with first-generation Pentium processors and 56K internet connections had access to a much superior internet experience thanks to Flash. According to Adobe's own statistics, over 90% of internet-enabled PCs have the Flash Player browser plugin installed. Apparently the "open/free everything" proponents want the world to get rid of the Flash plugin. Why? Because it's not "open", not all platforms can use it, and it poses security hazards.

Brandishing an extremely original name, "Occupy Flash" calls itself to be a "movement to rid the world of Flash Player plugin," because "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology." Occupy Flash argues that with HTML5, Flash is redundant and "free". Not quite; people don't pay for Flash Player plugins, those who create Flash content do, for the Adobe Flash software. It's not like a transition to HTML5 is going to change that equation much. People still won't have to pay to be able to consume public HTML5 content, while those creating it will still need to use proprietary software to create quality content, it's just that they'll end up with more vendors to sell them that.

Well, this 11.11 release doesn't list any performance improvements unfortunately. It contains just one new unexciting feature and a few fixes, but still has quite a long list of known issues. The new feature is Adobe Flash Player 11 hardware accelerated graphics support, including the A-series and E-series APUs. Fixes include things like Rage texture corruption, bezel compensation working correctly in Far Cry 2 and a screen tearing fix for displays in clone mode. Therefore, if your setup is working fine, there's no rush to update to this driver in case it breaks something. Note the following CAP 1 profile updates added to this release:

- Battlefield 3: Tweaks to the CrossFire profile
- Global Ops: Commando Libya: Improves CrossFire performance
- Driver San Francisco: Disables CrossFire

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

DOWNLOAD: Release Notes

In early October, content technology major Adobe will release Flash Player 11, the next major release of the Adobe Flash client-end software. The new browser plugin promises a platform that allows 1,000 times faster 2D/3D rendering performance over Flash Player 10, using full hardware-acceleration. Right here we see Adobe waking up to the HTML5 threat. Angry Birds on Google Chrome, anyone? The next key area addressed by Flash Player 11, is full native 64-bit (x86-64) web-browser support. This move will potentially cause the long-overdue decline of 32-bit web-browsers on 64-bit operating systems, since you already have HTML5 and Java on 64-bit browsers.

Next up, Adobe will pack its AIR platform, a Flash-based application runtime environment that uses the "superior user-interface" plank. AIR 3, which accompanies Flash Player 11, will support native extensions, that gives AIR applications added functionality. These include hardware capabilities including access to device data, vibration control, magnetometers, light sensors, dual screens, near field communications (NFC) and more. You know what adobe is getting at, future portable devices that are extremely powerful and functional.

Introducing the MB882HX-1SB 2.5" SATA SSD Xpander Hybrid Adapter. Using a high speed 2.5" SATA SSD and a high capacity 3.5" SATA hard drive, you can combine them to create a new breed of species. Using our hybrid technology, we can take a moderate or 2nd generation 2.5" SATA SSD in combination with a mid to higher end 3.5" SATA hard drive which automatically creates "hybrid partition" and "storage partition". The "hybrid partition" doubles the capacity of the SSD drive and provides high performance in transfer rates. The storage partition gives you the remaining capacity of the hard drive* (the size of the 3.5" SATA hard drive minus "hybrid partition" size).

This is the perfect upgrade solution without purchasing an expensive high capacity SSD. The Xpander Hybrid Adapter doubles the sequential transfer rates of the hard drive exclusively in the hybrid partition, it is great for people who move, play or edit large media files. Such as a video editor, graphic designer, HD movie enthusiast that use applications like Adobe Photoshop, Sony Vegas and Windows Media Center that require large file loads / transfers. For editing, you can use the hybrid portion as a sketch drive; move the working files to it for fast editing. When you are done with the file we recommend moving the file to a RAID protected archive drive. The "storage partition" is perfect for non-important applications or files i.e. games, movies, music, or other media files.

There must be some latent value in version number. Close to 3 years old, Google Chrome is already at version 14 in its developer channel. The grand old man of web-browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), which has a much slower release cycle, is at version 9. The second oldest browser in production, Opera, is at version 11. That leaves Mozilla Firefox, which is relatively newer to the market, but crawled its way past generations by versions 1.0x or 0.5x, with 0.0.1x in near-monthly minor updates. With the browser-wars hotting up as Google Chrome maintains its breakneck development cycle and MSIE regained competitiveness with version 9, Mozilla Firefox is ceding market-share. Perhaps this is pushing Mozilla to speed up its update cycle.

In Mozilla's case, this seems more like an version number inflation, because Firefox 4 was released just this March, and has only had one minor update since (4.0.1). The group is already looking to release the next "big release", Firefox 5, on 21 June, 2011. Its file locations on Mozilla's FTP are already leaked. Unlike with older major releases where each comes with a changed user interface, layout, or at least new icons; Firefox 5 user interface is identical to that of Firefox 4. The changes here are a faster webpage rendering engine, improved HTML5 support, the ability to pin bookmarked webpages to the Windows Taskbar a-là MSIE 9, and a built-in Adobe PDF reader a-là Chrome.

DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 5 (Win32)

Acer America Corp. announced today that the slim and stylish Acer Revo RL100 media center is now available at leading technology retailers in the United States. A digital hub for a den or living room, it connects to a flat-screen TV and comes with a dual-mode wireless touchpad/keyboard for smooth navigation from the comfort of the couch. There are two models available, including one with Blu-ray.

Outfitted with Acer clear.fi, the Acer RL100 automatically interconnects all Acer home-based and mobile devices, including smartphones, making it easy to consolidate and share HD multimedia throughout the household. This means users can access HD movies and personal content from any Acer device in the house for enjoying on a big screen TV.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2011 of $1.61 billion, net income of $510 million, or $0.68 per share, and operating income of $54 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $56 million, or $0.08 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $92 million.

"First quarter operating results were highlighted by strong demand for our first generation of AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)," said Thomas Seifert, CFO and interim CEO. "APU unit shipments greatly exceeded our expectations, and we are excited to build on that momentum now that we are shipping our 'Llano' APU."