Here are some of the first pictures of the Radeon RX 480 Nitro, and a reference-derived semi-custom graphics card by Sapphire. The RX 480 Nitro features a new dual-fan aluminium fin-stack cooling solution by Sapphire, with what looks like a metal cooler shroud featuring brushed aluminium finish, and a pair of 100 mm fans ventilating a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink. The company is also working on a card that's similar in design to AMD's reference card, with a few cosmetic changes, such as a glowing "Sapphire" logo instead of "Radeon," and a back-plate. The Radeon RX 480 is expected to go on sale a little later this month.

AMD today released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.6.1, just in time for two of the month's big game releases. The drivers come with optimizations for "Mirrors Edge: Catalyst" and "Paragon." The drivers also add CrossFire profiles for "Dark Souls III." The drivers address more instances of flickering noticed on CrossFire machines playing "Fallout 4," and performance drops in "DiRT Rally" in tracks with night/rainy settings.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.6.1 for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

AMD CEO Lisa Su, speaking at the company's Computex reveal held up the most important CPU product for the company, the new eight-core "Summit Ridge" processor. A posterboy of the company's new "Zen" micro-architecture, "Summit Ridge" is an eight-core processor with SMT enabling 16 threads for the OS to deal with, a massive 40% IPC increase over the current "Excavator" architecture, and a new platform based around the AM4 socket.

The AM4 socket sees AMD completely relocate the core-logic (chipset) to the processor's die. Socket AM4 motherboards won't have any chipset on them. This also means that the processor has an integrated PCI-Express gen 3.0 root complex, besides the DDR4 integrated memory controller. With the chipset being completely integrated, connectivity such as USB and SATA will be routed out of the processor. The AM4 socket is shared with another kind of products, the "Bristol Ridge" APU, which features "Excavator" CPU cores and a 512-SP GCN 1.2 iGPU.

AMD put out press pictures (for now renders) of its reference-design Radeon RX 480 board. The pictures reveal a very compact reference PCB, which draws power from just a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, and which uses a 5+2 phase VRM to power the card. The ASIC package is about the size of the "Tonga," and is surrounded by 8 memory chips. Display connectors include three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.0a. The blower-type reference cooler has to cope with a card with a typical board power of just 150W despite high clock speeds, and so we expect this to be a very cool and quiet card. We expect AMD to allow its add-in board (AIB) partners to come up with custom-design coolers from day one, and so the combination of this 150W card with the likes of IceQ X, VaporX, or TwinFrozr VI can only be blissful.

AMD today announced its full 7th Generation AMD A-Series Processor lineup, designed to help provide powerful productivity and entertainment performance with maximum mobility for consumers. Previously codenamed "Bristol Ridge" and "Stoney Ridge," the 7th Generation AMD FX, A-Series, and E-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) show major improvements in performance compared to the previous generation, including double-digit gains in gaming, video rendering, and file compression performance.

Consumers can take their gaming experience to the next level using a PC equipped with support for DirectX 12 and features like AMD FreeSync and AMD Dual Graphics technologies. AMD Advanced Power Management (APM) technology boosts performance to accomplish computing tasks with superior power efficiency for on-the-go capabilities. The new APUs allow users to enjoy the latest multimedia experiences in up-to Ultra HD 4K video resolution, with AMD FreeSync Technology support for fluid, artifact-free eSports-style gaming performance. 7th Generation AMD A-Series Processors enable a premium Microsoft Windows 10 experience and are primed to support the Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update, expected later this year.

AMD made a bold move in launching its first "Polaris" architecture based performance-segment GPU, the Radeon RX 480 at a starting price of US $199. The company claims that it will perform on-par with $500 graphics cards from the previous generation, directly hinting at performance being on par with the Radeon R9 Fury and R9 Nano. Although it's not in the league of the GTX 1070 or the GTX 1080, this level of performance at $199 could certainly disrupt things for NVIDIA, as it presents an attractive option for people still gaming on 1440p and 1080p resolutions (the overwhelming majority). The R9 Fury can handle any game at 1440p.

The Radeon RX 480 is based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" silicon, fabbed by GlobalFoundries. It's publicly known that GloFlo has a 14 nm fab in Malta (upstate New York), USA. The RX 480 is based on AMD's 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, codenamed "Polaris." It features 2,304 stream processors, spread across 36 compute units (CUs). Its single-precision floating point performance is rated by AMD to be "greater than 5 TFLOP/s." The chip features a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with memory clocked at 8 Gbps, yielding memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. There will be two variants of this card, 4 GB and 8 GB. It's the 4 GB variant that starts at $199, the 8 GB variant is expected to be priced at $229. AMD confirmed that the GPU will support DisplayPort 1.4 although it's certified up to DisplayPort 1.3. The typical board power is rated at 150W. The card could be available from 29th June.

Noctua is among the first CPU cooler manufacturers to develop a retention kit for the upcoming AMD socket AM4. There are three versions of this, compatible with all existing Noctua coolers, except D0 series and NH-L9i series. This means that even 10-year old heatsinks from Noctua should be able to cool next-gen AMD chips. Noctua will be giving these away for free to all existing customers (proof of purchase required).

MSI's drive to "carbonate" its Gaming Pro motherboard lineup is extending to the AMD platform, with the 970A Gaming Pro Carbon. Designed with the latest features available to this platform, this board resembles the 970A Gaming Pro, with the notable exception of faux carbon fiber patterns on the metal stickers heading the chipset and VRM heatsinks. You get quite a few modern features on this AMD 970+SB950 chipset based motherboard, such as dual-channel DDR3-2133 support out of the box, 20 Gb/s M.2 with NVMe support, two USB 3.1 ports (one each of type-A and type-C), and Intel gigabit Ethernet.

It looks like AMD is deviating from its top-level performance-grading, with its next-generation Radeon graphics cards. The company has maintained the Radeon R3 series for embedded low-power APUs, Radeon R5 for integrated graphics solutions of larger APUs; Radeon R7 for entry-thru-mainstream discrete GPUs (eg: R7 360, R7 370); and Radeon R9 for performance-thru-enthusiast segment (eg: R9 285, R9 290X). The new nomenclature could see it rely on the second set of model numbers (eg: 4#0) to denote market-positioning, if a popular rumor on tech bulletin boards such as Reddit holds true.

A Redditor posted an image of a next-gen AMD Radeon demo machine powered by a "Radeon RX 480." Either "X" could be a variable, or it could be series-wide, prefixing all SKUs in the 400 series. It could also be AMD marketing's way of somehow playing with the number 10 (X), to establish some kind of generational parity with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 series. The placard also depicts a new "Radeon" logo with a different, sharper typeface. The "RX 480" was apparently able to run "Doom" (2016) at 2560x1440 @ 144 Hz, with the OpenGL API.

AMD today announced AMD Multiuser GPU (MxGPU) for blade servers, AMD FirePro S7100X GPU. AMD MxGPU is the industry's first and only hardware-virtualized GPU compliant with the SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) PCIe virtualization standard. The AMD FirePro S7100X GPU is a simple, secure solution for graphics virtualization providing workstation-class experience for up to 16 users that is practically indistinguishable from a native desktop experience.

Using AMD Multiuser GPU (MxGPU) technology, the AMD FirePro S7100X GPU harnesses silicon expressly designed for graphics virtualization and conforming with the virtualization industry standard, SR-IOV to allow easy integration into existing hypervisor ecosystems. The AMD FirePro S7100X GPU is the newest addition to the AMD line of graphics virtualization products, designed in an ultra-compact form factor with a TGP of just 100W that makes it ideal for blade server deployments. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is the first to offer the AMD FirePro S7100X GPU in HPE ProLiant WS460c Gen9 Graphics Server Blades available now.

AMD released its encouraging fourth update to Radeon Software Crimson Edition for this month, with version 16.5.3 beta. The new drivers come with optimization for three games - "Overwatch," "Total War: Warhammer," and "Dota 2" with Vulkan API. The drivers also add CrossFireX profiles for "Overwatch" and "Total War: Warhammer." The drivers address a micro-stutter issue affecting CrossFire machines on "Fallout 4." Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.3 Beta for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

It looks like RGB multi-color LED lighting on graphics cards is here to stay, with ASUS teasing its next-generation DirectCU III graphics card cooling solution. The animated image (embedded after the break, below), shows LED strips lining the cooler shroud, with multi-color LED lighting. This cooler could feature on upcoming ROG STRIX graphics cards running NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070, and perhaps even some of AMD's upcoming GPUs, given how ASUS captions the image as "The Future Looks Bright." ZOTAC is the other partner with multi-color LEDs lining its GTX 1080/GTX 1070 graphics cards.

At its 2016 Annual Shareholders Meeting website, AMD reportedly posted a wafer shot of its upcoming 14 nm "Summit Ridge" CPU die. The "Summit Ridge" silicon is rumored to drive a number of performance-thru-enthusiast processor SKUs for AMD. The die pictured features eight CPU cores based on the "Zen" micro-architecture, a dual-channel DDR4 memory controller, 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and 16 MB of shared L3 cache split between two blocks of four CPU cores, each.

"Summit Ridge," much like the "Bristol Ridge" APU silicon, will be a true SoC, in that it integrates the southbridge on the processor die. With "Summit Ridge," AMD is also introducing a new inter-socket interconnect replacing its ageing HyperTransport technology. The new Global Memory Interconnect (GMI) bus provides a 100 GB/s path between two sockets. The "Summit Ridge" die features two such interconnect ports.

This week on TechPowerUp News, NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 1070 specifications deep-dive; an ASUS ROG notebook with suspected NVIDIA "Pascal" GPU, and AMD's Radeon "Polaris" unveiling ahead of the 2016 Computex show.

AMD today announced it will hold a press conference and live webcast during Computex 2016 in Taipei, Taiwan. The event will begin on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 at 10:00 AM CST / 10:00 PM EDT. The event will feature launch of 7th Generation AMD A-Series Processors, Polaris updates and more.

The event is slated to feature presentations from AMD executives including AMD President and CEO Lisa Su; Senior Vice President and General Manager, Computing and Graphics Business Group, Jim Anderson; and Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri.

AMD today released its third Radeon Software Crimson Edition update for this month. Version 16.5.2.1 provides a massive 35 percent performance increase for Radeon R9 390 series graphics cards (R9 390, R9 390X) on "Doom" (2016), compared to version 16.5.2, released earlier this month. The change-log does not mention whether this is also applicable to the nearly identical Radeon R9 290 series (R9 290, R9 290X, and R9 295X2). Not much else has changed, which explains the version numbering.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2.1 for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

Industry sources revealed to TechPowerUp some pretty interesting specifications of AMD's two upcoming GPUs based on the 4th generation Graphics CoreNext "Polaris" architecture. The company is preparing a performance-segment GPU and a mainstream one. It turns out, that the performance-segment chip, which the press has been referring to as "Ellesmere," could feature 32 compute units (CUs), and not the previously thought 40.

Assuming that each CU continues to consist of 64 stream processors (SP), you're looking at an SP count of 2,048. What's more, this chip is said to offer a single-precision floating point performance of 5.5 TFLOP/s, as claimed by AMD. To put this into perspective, the company had claimed 5.2 TFLOP/s for the "Hawaii"/"Grenada" based FirePro W9100, which launched earlier this February, and that SKU featured all 2,816 SP present on the chip. So this chip is definitely faster than most "Hawaii" based SKUs.

AMD posted its second Radeon Software Crimson Edition release for this month, version 16.5.2 Beta. The drivers add optimization for "DOOM" (2016), the season's hottest shooter and a revival of the epic FPS franchise. The drivers also add CrossFire profiles for "Battleborn," letting it take advantage of multiple GPUs, and dual-GPU graphics cards, such as the Radeon Pro Duo. The drivers also fix texture corruption issues in "Star Wars: Battlefront," and "League of Legends" in CrossFire mode. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.5.2 for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

The latest TechPowerUp front-page survey springs up some interesting findings on what our readers are most looking forward to, with the upcoming GPUs. Timed ahead of market availability of new GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD, this poll gains relevance. At the time of writing of this article, we had received 4,650 votes over a week-long period, which amounts to a reasonable sample size. Some of the findings were surprising.

An overwhelming 60 percent of the respondents find price/performance most important. Interestingly, only 7 percent find efficiency/noise important. The second most popular choice, at 14 percent, was "4K Playability" (the ability for the GPU to play games at 4K Ultra HD resolution, at playable frame-rates). Our readers are seven times more likely to invest on 4K Ultra HD monitors (which start at $300 if you look in the right places), than picking up a VR (virtual reality) headset. A negligible 2 percent of our readers find VR most important.

In the wake of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, which if live up to their launch marketing, could render AMD's high-end lineup woefully outperformed, AMD reportedly decided to pull the launch of its next big silicon, Vega10, from its scheduled early-2017 launch, to October 2016. Vega10 is a successor to "Grenada," and will be built on the 5th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture (codenamed "Vega").

Vega10 will be a multi-chip module, and feature HBM2 memory. The 14 nm architecture will feature higher performance/Watt than even the upcoming "Polaris" architecture. "Vega10" isn't a successor to "Fiji," though. That honor is reserved for "Vega11." It is speculated that Vega10 will feature 4096 stream processors, and will power graphics cards that compete with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Vega11, on the other hand, is expected to feature 6144 stream processors, and could take on the bigger GP100-based SKUs. Both Vega10 and Vega11 will feature 4096-bit HBM2 memory interfaces, but could differ in standard memory sizes (think 8 GB vs. 16 GB).

Troubles mount for AMD as its Radeon add-in board (AIB) partners have reportedly expressed frustration at the company's lack of competition for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, and the timing of the company's May 26 unveiling of its Polaris 10 graphics card, which could be missing in action at the 2016 Computex expo. NVIDIA recently launched its GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, which are impressive on paper, with timely market availability by May 27 (for GTX 1080) and June 10 (for GTX 1070).

AMD hasn't launched a new performance-segment GPU since 2012. The company has been continuously re-branding its big high-end chips as performance-segment chips of future generations, which inevitably lose out on performance/Watt against NVIDIA, which has been launching new performance-segment chips since the GeForce "Kepler" architecture. AMD reportedly hasn't shared any strategy to counter the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 with its partners, nor has it named a successor to its R9 Fury series. It is, however, pacifying partners with good price-performance gains for its upcoming "Polaris" chips, which should help it win key mid-range and the lower-end of the performance-segment.

EK Water Blocks, Ljubljana based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer, is releasing a new Full-Cover water block, designed and engineered specifically for AMD RADEON Pro Duo graphics cards. Radeon has done it again by creating the fastest gaming card in the world. Improving over the Radeon R9 295 X2, the Radeon Pro Duo card is faster and uses the 3rd generation GCN architecture featuring asynchronous shaders enables the latest DirectX 12 and Vulkan titles to deliver amazing 4K and VR gaming experiences.

And now EK Water Blocks made sure, the owners can get the best possible liquid cooling solution for the card as well. Enclosed single-slot I/O bracket will transform the AMD RADEON Pro Duo from a dual slot card into a single slot card. EK-FC Radeon Pro Duo water block features EK unique central inlet split-flow cooling engine with a micro fin design for best possible cooling performance of both GPU cores. The block design also allows flawless operation with reversed water flow without adversely affecting the cooling performance. Moreover, such design offers great hydraulic performance, allowing this product to be used in liquid cooling systems using weaker water pumps.

The first AMD Radeon graphics cards based on the company's "Polaris" architecture are slated for a late-May launch, according to Thai tech-site Zolkorn. The company is reportedly planning an elaborate launch event in Macau, China, days ahead of the 2016 Computex trade-show in Taipei. AMD has reportedly already sent invites to media outlets, although to a very limited number (in comparison to, say, NVIDIA's GTX 1080 event in Austin, US). The event could see a paper-launch of the first Radeon R9 400 series graphics cards based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" and "Baffin" chips, with AIB-branded cards being exhibited at Computex, and market-availability following shortly after.

This week on TechPowerUp News (after a brief sabbatical), we'll talk about Intel's exciting new Core i7-7700K "Kaby Lake" processor, Core i7-6950X and i7-6850X "Broadwell-E" benchmarks, and AMD 8-core "Summit Ridge."

AMD posted resources that help game developers take advantage of the AMD CrossFire multi-GPU technology, through its GPUOpen initiative. In a detailed blog post on its GPUOpen website, AMD detailed that since its Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers, the company has been offering CrossFire API as an extension of DirectX 11. While it posted a detailed CrossFire Guide with developer resources, in its GPUOpen blog post, AMD also posted the basics of the simplest way to take advantage of a multi-GPU setup - alternate frame rendering (AFR), in which GPUs render alternating frames of a 3D scene, theoretically multiplying frame-rates.