AMD today released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.1 Beta, which brings support for the impending Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare as well as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered. The software also includes a CrossFire profile for Titanfall 2 under DX11. The long list of fixes and known issues are best left after the break. As always, you can grab the new drivers right below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.11.1 Beta for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

AMD's upcoming 8-core "ZEN" processors pack serious multithreaded performance muscle. The company's design focus on empowering the cores, and getting rid of the shared-resource approach to multi-core chips; appears to have paid of big dividends in multithreaded performance, as tested on the Blender benchmark. An 8-core "ZEN" engineering sample was found to be belting out performance rivaling 10-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2 series chips, indicating that AMD appears to have made huge gains in per-core performance over its previous generation chips.

The Blender benchmark scores of an alleged AMD ZEN "Summit Ridge" engineering sample were posted by Blender benchmark scores aggregator Blenchmark; and unearthed by this redditor. According to these scores, the "ZEN" sample cruches the Blender benchmark render in 69 seconds, the same time it takes for a 10-core Xeon E5-2650 V2 processor. The ZEN chip is also closely trailing Xeon E5-2600 V4 series chips. AMD is expected to launch its first ZEN "Summit Ridge" 8-core processors in early 2017.

ASUS signs off the AMD socket AM3+ platform with a motherboard that's built to last, the TUF Sabertooth 990FX R3.0, its third TUF series motherboard based on the AMD 990FX chipset. The board could be the ideal upgrade for AMD FX processor users wanting to hold on to their builds a few years longer, as it features cutting-edge connectivity, such as four 10 Gb/s USB 3.1 ports (including a type-C port), eight additional 5 Gb/s USB 3.0 ports (of which four are via headers), a 20 Gb/s M.2 slot with NVMe support, and the very latest VRM innovations ASUS made for the TUF series.

The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS power connectors, and uses a 10-phase VRM to condition it for the CPU. The board supports 220W TDP AMD FX-9000 series CPUs. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, and the AMD 990FX northbridge. Expansion slots include four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, of which three are wired to the 990FX chip, and run at x16/NC/x16 or x16/x8/x8 depending on the way they're populated; while the fourth slot is wired to the SB950 southbridge, and runs at gen 2.0 x4. Storage connectivity includes five SATA 6 Gb/s ports besides the M.2 slot. 8-channel HD audio and gigabit Ethernet (Intel i211V controller) make for the rest of it. The board is driven by UEFI BIOS, and features Windows 10 certification. The company didn't reveal pricing.

ZOTAC International, a global manufacturer of innovation, is pleased to introduce MAGNUS ERX480 as the world's first AMD powered Mini PC equipped with Polaris Architecture. The award-winning ZBOX MAGNUS Gaming Mini PC series, renowned for whisper quiet performance, brings a refreshing level of power and speed for every gamer. "We are always aiming to provide powerful solutions available to a wide audience and the MAGNUS ERX480 could be it" said Jacky Huang, Director of Mini PC.

MAGNUS is designed for gaming and entertainment. Hosting power that surpasses the requirements for experiencing virtual reality, MAGNUS is an ideal solution for both high-end gaming, premium entertainment, and much more. "The Radeon RX 480 with Polaris Architecture changes the gaming hardware dynamic with an effective cost-performance combination. We're excited to partner with ZOTAC, a well-established gaming mini PC manufacturer, to bring together the world first and most powerful AMD based gaming mini PC equipped with a Radeon RX 480" said Spencer Pan, AMD Corporate VP and President of Greater China.

Ahead of their launch later this year, to cater to the 7th generation AMD A-series "Bristol Ridge" APUs, with support for next-generation "ZEN" processors due in 2017, two GIGABYTE socket AM4 motherboards smiled for the camera. The two appear to be based on either AMD's entry-level A320 or mid-range B350 chipsets. Since the AM4 chips are true-blue SoCs with complete integration of chipsets, including what you'd normally call a southbridge or FCH; the "chipsets" in the AM4 platform are merely chips that add to the PCIe lane budget of the platform, and provide additional SATA and USB connectivity.

The first of the two GIGABYTE AM4 boards is built in the narrow micro-ATX form-factor; featuring a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, two DDR4 DIMM slots, four SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and basic connectivity that includes 6-channel HD audio, one gigabit Ethernet connection, and 4-6 USB 3.0 ports. The second board is better endowed, and is likely a variation of the socket AM4 board that was earlier pictured this September. It features two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 ports (the second one could be electrical x4); and comes with two additional SATA 6 Gb/s and USB 3.0 ports compared to the other board.

If you were wondering what the exact specs were on AMD's Polaris-imbued Radeon Pro 400 series of graphics cards, recently announced to be the driving GPUs on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, you need not imagine what they could be anymore. Under their "Meet the Creators" program, the company has now published the specifications.

From top to bottom, the Radeon Pro 460 packs a total of 16 Compute Units (CUs), totalling 1024 stream processors, with peak theoretical performance of up to 1.86 teraflops. The middle of pack Radeon Pro 455 cuts those to 12 CUs and 768 stream processors, with peak theoretical performance of up to 1.3 teraflops. Finally, the lowest performer of the bunch is the Radeon Pro 450, which features only 10 CUs (640 stream processors) and has a theoretical bandwidth of up to 1 teraflops. Also of note is the fact that all three of the parts leverage the same 80 Gb/s memory bandwidth.

AMD today released Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.3, the month's third release of the drivers. Version 16.10.3 addresses a "Titanfall 2" intermittent game crash affecting AMD Graphics CoreNext GPUs (which is all of the GPUs under the current driver support branch). The rest of its feature-set appear to be consistent with the older Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.2 drivers. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.3 for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

AMD today unveiled a new family of power-efficient graphics processors, Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics. Available first in the all-new 15-inch MacBook Pro, select Radeon Pro 400 Series graphics deliver extraordinary performance and efficiency gains over the prior generation to fuel modern creative efforts from anywhere inspiration strikes.

Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics are designed specifically for today's makers -- the artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, visualizers and engineers that shape the modern content creation era. Harnessing AMD's acclaimed Polaris architecture, Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics are built on the industry's most advanced process technology for graphics processors in production today, 14 nm FinFET, resulting in incredibly small transistors.

To enable the thinnest graphics processor possible, AMD also employs a complex process known as 'die thinning' to reduce the thickness of each wafer of silicon used in the processor from 780 microns to just 380 microns, or slightly less than the thickness of four pieces of paper. Operating in a power envelope under 35W, the Radeon Pro 450, 455, and 460 Series graphics processors deliver spectacular energy efficiency and cool, quiet operation to speed through the most demanding tasks in popular creative applications.

AMD is making inroads to the world's second largest film industry, the Indian film industry. Speaking at the 2016 Mumbai Film Festival held last week, the company announced that it is working with Arka Mediaworks, a big-budget production house, to shoot its next blockbuster movie, "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion" in 360-degree VR. Although the primary version of the film is shot in some of the largest 2D production formats, each scene in the film is additionally produced in 360° VR. AMD is separately pushing for VR in Indian cinemas, so the VR experience of "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion" could be exhibited to the masses.

At the heart of this endeavor is a 360° camera rig custom-built by AMD, called the BB360. The rig combines two dozen ultra high-resolution cameras feeding to a workstation with production hardware and VR mastering software made by AMD. The company claims that the BB360 is the most advanced VR camera rig ever built, and makes its production debut with "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion," due for spring 2017.

AMD's domination in the sub-$200 market is rattled with NVIDIA's introduction of the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and the GTX 1050. In addition to sending out media flyers pointing out what makes its GPUs better consumer choices than NVIDIA's, the company cut prices of two key SKUs - Radeon RX 470 4GB, and Radeon RX 460.

Pricing of the Radeon RX 470 4 GB is cut down to $159.99, from its $169.99 launch price. This puts the SKU just $20 above the GTX 1050 Ti. For $20 more you get double the memory bandwidth and higher performance, says AMD. Price of the Radeon RX 460 2 GB is cut down to $99.99, from $109.99, making it $10 cheaper than the GTX 1050 (non-Ti). The GeForce GTX 1050 series goes on sale from the 25th October, 2016.

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1050 Ti launch, AMD fired off an elaborate press-deck explaining why consumers should choose its $169 Radeon RX 470 graphics card over the $139 GeForce GTX 1050 Ti it announced last Tuesday (18/10), which is due for market launch a week later (25/10). The presentation begins explaining that the RX 470 is better equipped to offer above 60 fps on all of today's games at 1080p (Full HD) resolution, with anti-aliasing enabled.

Later down the presentation, AMD alleges that NVIDIA "Pascal" architecture lacks asynchronous compute feature. There are already games that take advantage of it. AMD also claims that its "Polaris" based GPUs RX 480, RX 470, and RX 460, will be faster than competing GTX 1060, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 750 Ti at "Battlefield 1" with its DirectX 12 renderer. The presentation ends with a refresher of the company's current product-stack, and how it measures up to NVIDIA's offerings across the competitive landscape. Turns out there is indeed a big price/performance gap between the RX 460 and RX 470, just waiting to be filled.

With the arrival of the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050, the sub-$150 graphics card market is beginning to heat up. AMD is finding itself with a price-performance gorge between the Radeon RX 460 and the RX 470. Citing multiple sources, VideoCardz suspects that AMD is up to something - a new Polaris 10 "Ellesmere" based SKU positioned between the RX 460 and RX 470, referred to either as the "RX 465" or the "RX 470 SE."

The new SKU is further cut down from the Polaris 10 stack, in a bid to lower TDP below the 100W mark, to around 90W. The chip features 1,792 stream processors across 28 Graphics CoreNext compute units (CUs), out of the 36 CUs physically present on the chip. The RX 470 features 32 CUs, while the RX 480 maxes out all available CUs. AMD is leaving the memory bus untouched. It features 4 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface, ticking at 7.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective), churning up 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth - double that of the GTX 1050 series. There's also talk of yet another SKU, with 1,536 stream processors (24/36 CUs enabled), which AMD could position against the GTX 1050 (non-Ti).

AMD today released their earnings call for 3Q 2016, giving us some interesting tidbits in regards to their financial robustness. The balance of AMD's economics seems to be pending towards better execution, and, coeteris paribus, a much better outlook for the coming quarters, after the monumental missteps in the past that almost threw AMD under the proverbial bus. Reception for the results seems to be a tangled mess, however, with some sides claiming that AMD beat expectations, while others prefer to draw attention to AMD's 2% stock decline since the report was outed.

AMD posted revenue of $1,307 million, up 27% sequentially and 23% year-over-year. This revenue was distributed unevenly through AMD's divisions, though. "Computing and Graphics" segment revenue was $472 million, up 9% from Q2 2016, primarily due to increased GPU sales (where Polaris picked up the grunt of the work, being responsible for 50% of AMD's GPU revenue), offset by lower sales of client desktop processors and chipsets; whereas "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" segment revenue was $835 million, up 41% sequentially, primarily due to record semi-custom SoC sales (such as those found in Microsoft's XBOX One and Sony's PS4 and upcoming PS4 Pro).

AMD today released a new beta update to their Radeon Software Crimson Edition. Version 16.10.2 Beta features driver support for upcoming games like "Battlefield 1", "Sid Meier's Civilization VI", "Titanfall 2", "Serious Sam VR Early Access", as well as "Eagle Flight VR". Also included is a new AMD CrossFire profile for "Sid Meyer's Civilization VI" under DX11, and Battlefield 1 AMD CrossFire profile updates for the game's launch.

The release notes also list some fixed issues, namely:

• Fan speed may sometimes remain elevated on select Radeon RX 400 series graphics products even when an application has been exited;
• Eyefinity group settings may not be retained after driver upgrade when using AMD CrssFire configurations;
• Gears of War 4 may experience an application hang when using select high resolution and quality configurations i some specific game maps;
• DirectX 12 content may be unable to launch on some older CPUs that do not support "popcnt" instruction.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.2 Beta for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

After months of speculation, the lid is off Nintendo's "NX" project, with the company finally announcing today its much-awaited games console, the Nintendo Switch. With an expected release slated for March 2017, the console blurs the line between a games console and a handheld device, by making use of a docking station which will allow it to connect to a television, much like a traditional games console, while instantly entering a so called "portable mode" when it is undocked. As both a console and a portable device, the Nintendo Switch will use cartridges known as Game Cards, displaying games in a "high definition display" embedded on the console while on the go, with two detachable Joy-Con controllers stepping in as input devices.

For PC hardware enthusiasts, that may not be all too interesting. What is arguably more interesting is that this games console will make use of NVIDIA hardware: most notably, a custom Tegra processor is the one pulling out all of the console's processing needs, with the graphics being served by what the company calls "the same architecture as the world's top-performing GeForce gaming graphics cards."

TUL Corporation, a leading and innovative manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, has announced DEVIL BOX is ready to sell Now. PowerColor DEVIL BOX is based on AMD XConnect Technology which was introduced on March 16th, 2016 by AMD. AMD had developed this technology in collaboration with Intel's Thunderbolt group and Razer Inc.

The PowerColor DEVIL BOX is primarily for the users who would like to have an even more powerful graphics card on his/her notebook in pursuit of desktop-class graphics performance. With a qualified graphics card, not limited to either AMD or nVidia, installed in the PowerColor DEVIL BOX and connecting with Thunderbolt 3 specification, gamers and enthusiasts will be able to play any types of games on the market without sacrificing the portability of a thin'n'light notebook.

Shader intrinsic functions stand as a partial solution for granting developers more control over existing computational resources and how they are leveraged. This capability (much touted by AMD as a performance-enhancing feature on their GCN-based products) essentially exposes features and capabilities that exist on the hardware developers are programming for, but wouldn't generally be able to access. This can happen either because they're being abstracted by a high-level API (Application Programming Interface, like DX11), or because the API isn't functionally able to access them. To understand why high-level APIs such as DX11 don't usually offer support for a piece of hardware's full feature list, or full processing capabilities, we must first look at the basic architecture of a given computer system.

AMD today outlined powerful new solutions to two of the largest issues facing professional VR content creators today: how to create compelling VR content that approaches cinematic fidelity, and how to maximize that content's viewership. In the opening keynote at VR on the Lot, a two-day summit bringing together the top players in media, entertainment and technology, AMD detailed innovative Radeon Pro technologies designed to fuel the creation of real-time photorealistic VR content, and announced collaborations to facilitate the distribution of premium VR content to out-of-home experiences around the world.

"In creating Radeon Pro, we sought to address the industry's biggest problems, and for many creators, there's none bigger than cinematic VR content," said Roy Taylor, corporate VP and head of alliances, content and VR, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "Bringing your creative vision to life can be a demanding and laborious process and working in VR, those demands are exponentially multiplied. Through extraordinary Radeon Pro hardware and software, we're helping alleviate the technical burdens of creativity, empowering artists to focus on telling their story, and through our efforts in location-based entertainment, giving them new opportunities to share their work with the world."

Rouchon Industries Inc., dba Swiftech, is reportedly bringing to market a custom water block for AMD's RX 480. According to reddit user CBwardog, who spoke with a company representative, the water block is expected to come in an Acetal + Nickel package, bearing a price-tag of $99.95. No official announcement from Swiftech at this time, though it is expected that the water block will become available for sale to end-users worldwide through the usual channels in a mere three weeks.

On the heels of the recent Gen-Z interconnect announcement, an aggregate of some of the most recognizable names in the tech industry have once again banded together. This time, it's an effort towards the implementation of a fast, coherent and widely compatible interconnect technology that will pave the way towards tighter integration of ever-more heterogeneous systems.

Technology leaders AMD, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, NVIDIA and Xilinx announced the new open standard to appropriate fanfare, considering the promises of an up-to 10x performance uplift in datacenter server environments, thus accelerating big-data, machine learning, analytics, and other emerging workloads. The interconnect promises to provide a high-speed pathway towards tighter integration between different types of technology currently making up the heterogeneous server computing's needs, ranging through fixed-purpose accelerators, current and future system memory subsistems, and coherent storage and network controllers.

In another business-deal-gone-right for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in chinese soil, the company is now going to provide China's Alibaba giant with server chips with which to power the company's cloud vision. Whilst Alibaba is most commonly known due to its e-commerce activities (through the Aliexpress and Taobao brands), the chinese company is diversifying, even going so far as entering the entertainment space. Now, Alibaba is bidding to carve itself an even larger piece of the cloud market from the likes of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's Web Services.

The deal was announced this Friday at the Alibaba Computing Conference by Lisa Su (AMD's CEO) and Simon Hu (president of Alibaba Cloud, the chinese giant's cloud computing arm). Through it, AMD will see its Radeon Pro chips supporting and expanding upon the increasingly-in-demand cloud computing capabilities of the chinese company, which already powers around 35% of China's websites.

AMD today released the WHQL-signed variants of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition version 16.10.1 drivers, which it released earlier this month. Besides optimization for "Gears of War 4" and "Mafia III," and CrossFire profiles for "Shadow Warrior 2," these drivers come with support for the Oculus Asynchronous Spacewarp feature on graphics cards based on the "Polaris 10" silicon (Radeon RX 480, RX 470). Grab the drivers from the links below.

AMD defines Asynchronous Spacewarp as the following.

ASW compares previously rendered frames, detects the motion between them, and extrapolates the position of scene components to create a new synthetic frame. Using this technology, synthetic frames will accurately approximate the fully-rendered frames they're designed to replace.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.1 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

According to TweakTown, AMD may be preparing to bring the fight to the as-of-yet unannounced GTX 1050 Ti with a $10 price-drop on their 1080p price-performance king RX 470 from the current $179, bringing the price down to $169. NVIDIA is purportedly planning to bring the GTX 1050 Ti to market at the $149 price point, with a rated TDP of only 75 W and apparently no need for additional power connectors (at least on reference designs). However, faced with a measly $20 difference from the supposedly higher-performing RX 470 - which could sometimes be up to 30% faster - the battle for the $150 bracket might prove to be an uphill battle for the green camp.

Add to that the latest updates unveiled by Oculus on Oculus Connect 3, with the RX 470 being stamped with the VR-ready approval, as well as the greater availability and lower price of FreeSync monitors (sometimes with as much as four times the number of FreeSync offers versus G-Sync ones), and it really does seem that AMD is poised to offer the best value in its price bracket. Of course, things get muddier if you take into account the current pricing landscape for graphics cards from either manufacturer (where most models are selling upwards of their MSRP).

In what promises to be AMD's most ambitious (and lucrative) semi-custom hardware deal to date, the company partnered with CoreAVI, a leading manufacturer of commercial jet avionics, to develop high-performance cockpit display modules that perform on-the-fly terrain mapping. The company is designing special variants of its Radeon embedded GPUs and APUs (as in accelerated processing units, not auxiliary power); which drive high-resolution cockpit displays with reliable levels of performance.

The company is tapping into its most proven GPU IP and the ubiquitous x86 CPU architecture to drive PFD (primary flight display) modules. AMD hardware's surplus-to-requirement processing power comes in handy in accelerating terrain mapping software on-the-fly. On the software side of things, AMD is tapping into open industry standards such as OpenGL, custom-built for mission-critical (safety-critical) applications. AMD isn't new to the CoreAVI product stack. The company has been supplying extended temperature-range variants of its Radeon embedded GPUs to the company for some time now.A video presentation follows.

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.