AMD provided customers with a glimpse of its upcoming 2016 Polaris GPU architecture, highlighting a wide range of significant architectural improvements including HDR monitor support, and industry-leading performance-per-watt. AMD expects shipments of Polaris architecture-based GPUs to begin in mid-2016.

AMD's Polaris architecture-based 14nm FinFET GPUs deliver a remarkable generational jump in power efficiency. Polaris-based GPUs are designed for fluid frame rates in graphics, gaming, VR and multimedia applications running on compelling small form-factor thin and light computer designs.

"Our new Polaris architecture showcases significant advances in performance, power efficiency and features," said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "2016 will be a very exciting year for Radeon fans driven by our Polaris architecture, Radeon Software Crimson Edition and a host of other innovations in the pipeline from our Radeon Technologies Group."

Microsoft could make the Xbox One "slimmer" and more energy-efficient by leveraging AMD's upcoming 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, codenamed "Polaris." Found in the footnotes of AMD's "Polaris" press-deck, mentioned as an ominous-sounding "Xbox One Polaris," the mention hints at a revision of Xbox One that features an SoC running a "Polaris" based SoC. Microsoft could leverage the energy-efficiency improvements, and possibly upcoming processes, such as 14 nm FinFET, to bring down power-draw, thermal requirements, and possibly cost.

The fourth generation of AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture has been reportedly codenamed "Polaris" by the company. It makes its debut later this year in the company's "Arctic Islands" GPUs, built on Samsung's 14 nm FinFET node. According to the company, Polaris will provide a "historic leap in performance/Watt" for Radeon GPUs. Chips based on Polaris will feature improvements to not just the compute units, but will also come with generational improvements to pretty much every other component, including a new front-end, display controllers, and a new memory controller supporting HBM2.

AMD debuted its first generation GCN architecture with the Radeon HD 7000 series, notably the "Tahiti" silicon. Its second-generation, GCN 2.0, (reported in the press as GCN 1.1), debuted with the R9 290 series, notably the "Hawaii" silicon. The third-generation, GCN 3.0 (reported in the press as GCN 1.2), debuted with the R9 285, notably the "Tonga" silicon; making "Polaris" the fourth-generation. GCN 4.0 will form the core micro-architecture of the "Arctic Islands" family of GPUs, which make their debut in mid-2016.

This week on TechPowerUp News: Samsung to build AMD "Zen" and "Arctic Islands" on its 14 nm FinFET LPP node, while NVIDIA stares at a possible sales ban over patent spat with Samsung.

Originally expected to unveil/launch some time in December-January, AMD's upcoming flagship dual-GPU graphics card based on its "Fiji" silicon could now be scheduled for a Q2-2016 (April-June) launch. In its E3 livecast, AMD CEO Lisa Su stated that the dual-GPU "Fiji" product could launch as early as Christmas 2015. We now know that it isn't happening.

Responding to a question by Hardware.fr, AMD stated that it's pegging the launch of the dual-GPU "Fiji" card to commercial availability of HMDs (head-mounted displays), and a general sense of maturity in the VR ecosystem. AMD is now expecting HMDs to be well proliferated no sooner than Q2-2016, and is hence "adjusting the Fiji Gemini launch schedule to better align with the market," to "ensure the optimal VR experience." AMD did state that samples of the card have been shipped to some of its B2B partners for internal testing within Q4-2015, and their response have been "positive." Could this be AMD buying time to re-engineer a non-Cooler Master cooling solution?

It has been confirmed that Samsung will be AMD's foundry partner for its next generation GPUs. It has been reported that AMD's upcoming "Arctic Islands" family of GPUs could be built on the 14 nanometer FinFET LPP (low-power Plus) process. AMD's rival NVIDIA, meanwhile, is building its next-gen "Pascal" GPU family on 16 nanometer FinFET node, likely at its traditional foundry partner TSMC.

It gets better - not only will Samsung manufacture AMD's next-gen GPUs, but also its upcoming "Zen" family of CPUs, at least a portion of it. AMD is looking to distribute manufacturing loads between two foundries, Samsung and GlobalFoundries, perhaps to ensure that foundry-level teething trouble doesn't throw its product launch cycle off the rails. One of the most talked about "Arctic Islands" GPUs is codenamed "Greenland," likely a successor to "Fiji." Sales of some of the first chips - GPUs or CPUs - made at Samsung, will begin some time in Q3 2016. Some of the other clients for Samsung's 14 nm FinFET node are Apple and Qualcomm. The company plans to speed up development of its more advanced 10 nm node to some time in 2017.

In this episode of TechPowerUp News: the return of overclocking on budget Intel CPUs by playing with base-clock (BClk); and AMD GPUOpen, the company's ambitious counter to NVIDIA GameWorks that harnesses the power of open-source.

AMD released the WHQL-signed version of Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 as the new 15.12 WHQL. It addresses a variety of game-specific issues, including rendering errors on Star Wars: Battlefront; bugs on Fallout 4; texture-compression issues with Just Cause 3; poor CrossFire performance with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. It also addresses a critical issue in which the driver would either spool fan-speeds all the way up to 100% on load, or lock them down at 30%, causing certain GPUs to overheat. A variety of bugs specific to the Radeon Settings app were also addressed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.12 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

The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation today announced publication of Heterogeneous System Architecture: A New Compute Platform Infrastructure (1st Edition), edited by Dr. Wen-Mei Hwu. The book, published by Elsevier Publishing (found here: here), offers a practical guide to understanding HSA, a standardized platform design that unlocks the performance and power efficiency of parallel computing engines found in most modern electronic devices.

"Heterogeneous computing is a key enabler of the next generation of compute environments, wherein entire systems will interconnect autonomously and in real time," said HSA Foundation President Dr. John Glossner. "Developers who are skilled in the use of this platform will have the upper hand in terms of design time, IP portability, power efficiency and performance."

To support these developers, the HSA Foundation working groups are rapidly standardizing tools and APIs for debug and profiling, creating guidelines for incorporating IP from multiple vendors into the same SoC, and much more. The Foundation released the v1.0 specification in March, and soon thereafter, companies including AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies and MediaTek previewed their plans for rolling out the world's first products based on HSA.

AMD is in no mood to let NVIDIA run away with the PC graphics market, with its GameWorks SDK that speeds up PC graphics development (in turn increasing NVIDIA's influence over the game development, in a predominantly AMD GCN driven client base (20% PC graphics market-share, and 100% game console market share). AMD's counter to GameWorks is GPUOpen, with the "open" referring to "open-source."

GPUOpen is a vast set of pre-developed visual-effects, tools, libraries, and SDKs, designed to give developers "unprecedented control" over the GPU, helping them get their software closer to the metal than any other software can. The idea here is that an NVIDIA GameWorks designed title won't get you as "close" to the metal on machines such as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, or PCs with Radeon GPUs, as GPUOpen. Getting "close to the metal" is defined as directly leveraging features exposed by the GPU, with as few software layers between the app and the hardware as possible.

AMD fleshed out its sub-$150 desktop CPU lineup with the new FX-6330, a socket AM3+ six-core chip based on the 32 nm "Vishera" silicon, which is priced at $109. At this price, it will take on the entry-level Core i3 and Pentium dual-core chips from Intel. This chip offers out of the box clocks of 3.60 GHz, and a maximum TurboCore frequency of 4.20 GHz. Its six cores are spread across three "Piledriver" modules. It features a total of 6 MB of L2, and 8 MB of L3 caches. The integrated memory controller supports dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory. Its TDP is rated at 95W.

In a bid to step up the pressure on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and the product-stack below it, AMD is getting its add-in board (AIB) graphics card partners to launch cost-effective variants of the Radeon R9 390, with 4 GB of memory, instead of the 8 GB that was standard to the SKU. These cards feature 4 GB of memory across the chip's 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, and could help AMD and its partners shave a few dozen Dollars off the standard version, which is currently selling for as low as $309.

4 GB of memory would make the R9 390 a complete re-brand of the R9 290, if not for its clock speeds. The custom-design variants of the 4 GB R9 390 ship with clock speeds that are 10% higher than those of the R9 290, and the performance was found to be proportionately higher, by Expreview. Of the three cards spotted crawling their way out of product launch pipes in China, the ones from XFX and PowerColor retain the design and packaging of their 8 GB siblings; while Sapphire mated the chip with a new dual-fan cooler with a meaty, split aluminium fin-stack heatsink.

In this week's episode of TechPowerUp News: AMD dragged into Asetek vs. Cooler Master liquid cooling patent-infringement mess; EVGA and K|ngp|n's 2 GHz GTX 980 Ti conquest that breaks several 3DMark records; and EVGA's new liquid-cooled GTX 970 graphics card.

A lot is riding on AMD's upcoming desktop CPU socket, codenamed AM4. Some of the first motherboards based on this socket are expected to launch in March 2016. What makes the socket particularly interesting (and important) is that it's a transition point for AMD's two major CPU architecture generations - "Excavator" and "Zen." Excavator is an incremental upgrade of AMD's less than successful "Bulldozer" architecture, while "Zen" is its next major one. AM4 is also going to be a common socket for AMD's desktop APU and many-core CPUs.

Some of the first socket AM4 APUs could be "Bristol Ridge." Succeeding the company's "Carrizo" APUs, it will be available in both socket AM4, supporting DDR4 memory, and FP4, supporting both DDR3 and DDR4. This chip will implement "Excavator" CPU cores. In its AM4 avatar, "Bristol Ridge" will offer up to four CPU cores, with TDP ranging between 45W-65W, and with support for DDR4-2400 memory. Later in 2016, AMD could debut its first "Zen" multi-core CPUs, which feature the company's next-gen, performance-focused CPU cores.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced that the company achieved a number one market share position for thin clients based on its thin-client shipments. According to its unit sales to thin client customers last year, AMD has more than half of that market, with 53 percent market share.

Thin clients, with little or no local storage, often serve as intelligent front-ends for server or cloud-based applications. Thin clients using AMD Embedded G-Series have a strong value proposition for immersive graphics in single- or multi-display configurations in the enterprise. Recent design wins with HP, Fujitsu, and Samsung validate that AMD APUs provide compelling value with horsepower for data movement, encryption/decryption of central server data, and even video encode/decode for video conferencing or multimedia streaming.

"The AMD Embedded G-Series SoC couples high performance compute and graphics capability in a highly integrated low power design," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Enterprise Solutions. "These processors provide compelling performance per dollar per watt, strong security, sophisticated power management, and superior graphics performance. The product lineup includes an unparalleled range of pin- and software-compatible offerings, helping to address multiple needs of our customers."

AMD is readying a slew of feature-set additions to its Radeon GPUs, in 2016, targeted at display technology. To begin with, AMD is redesigning FreeSync, its adaptive-sync technology, to work over HDMI. The tech currently requires DisplayPort 1.2a. For this to work, the display should support FreeSync over HDMI on its end, as well. It's not as if every current HDMI display gets adaptive sync. AMD posted a partial list of upcoming displays that support FreeSync over HDMI. With this, AMD is pushing for a new generation of notebooks and convertibles that feature FreeSync displays.

Next up, AMD is implementing high dynamic range (HDR) display support on next-generation Radeon GPUs. Current Radeon GPUs already support 10-bit (30-bit color or 1.07 billion colors, compared to 16.7 million colors on 32-bit); on desktop, Direct3D, and OpenGL apps. HDR will make images look more life-like. AMD claims that 1080p HDR content will look better than 4K SDR (standard dynamic range) content. AMD will also work with game developers to get HDR content on upcoming games.

In this episode of TechPowerUp News, price drops across the meat of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 900 lineup; the new upcoming AMD dual-GPU "Fiji" graphics card, and Michael Mantor's elevation in AMD.

AMD issued a response to a recent report which states that liquid cooling components maker Asetek issued a cease-and-desist to the company, to stop sales of the Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card, which implements a closed-loop liquid-cooling solution made by Cooler Master. In its response, AMD argues that the jury in the Asetek vs. CMI (Cooler Master) case did not mention the cooling solution of the Radeon R9 Fury X specifically, as infringing Asetek-held patents. The statement reads:

"We are aware that Asetek has sued Cooler Master. While we defer to Cooler Master regarding the details of the litigation, we understand that the jury in that case did not find that the Cooler Master heat sink currently used with the Radeon Fury X infringed any of Asetek's patents."

While AMD is right in pointing out that the original judgement does not name the R9 Fury X, or its cooling solution as an infringing product; there's no word on whether AMD will stop sales of the card. From the looks of it, AMD has no plans to stop sales of its flagship graphics product, and appears to have convincing legal arguments up its sleeves to continue selling the card, in the near future.

AMD has reportedly been issued a "cease-and-desist" notice by liquid cooling components major Asetek over sale of its flagship Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card. A similar C&D notice was sent to GIGABYTE, to stop sales of its GeForce GTX 980 Water Force graphics card. The two cards ship with a factory-fitted, closed-loop liquid cooling solution by Cooler Master, a company with which Asetek is locked in a patent infringement lawsuit, over its pump-block and movable fittings designs.

The Radeon R9 Fury X and GIGABYTE GTX 980 Water Force feature a derivative of Cooler Master's Seidon 120M closed-loop cooler, a product red-flagged by U.S. courts over patent infringement. Asetek has already succeeded in getting Cooler Master to withdraw similar aftermarket cooling solutions from the U.S. market, such as the Seidon, Nepton, and Glacier. The courts have ordered Cooler Master to pay 14.5 percent royalties from revenues on each infringing product sold in the market, to Asetek.

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

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

In this week's edition of TechPowerUp News, our first impressions of AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition, AMD retiring active support for Radeon HD 6000 and HD 5000 series; HDMI 2.0 support on some of the newer Radeon GPUs, and an interesting new multi-system power splitter by Phanteks.

AMD today released Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 Update. A follow up to last week's major release, version 15.11.1 addresses a major issue with driver-level VGA fan speed control, which saw the driver either crank fan-speeds up to 100%, or lock them down to 30%, causing GPUs to overheat. In addition, the driver addresses several game-specific bugs related to Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, Star Wars: Battlefront, and Call of Duty Black Ops III.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 15.11.1 for Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bitImage Courtesy: PCAuthority.com.au

AMD could launch its next-generation dual-GPU graphics card based on the "Fiji" silicon, some time in December. Codenamed "Fury-Gemini," the card features a pair of "Fiji" GPUs in an internal multi-GPU setup; and is cooled by an AIO liquid-cooling solution, much like the R9 Fury X. Prototype boards of this card were shown by AMD top-brass at some of the chip's earliest reveals. It's expected that the PCB (pictured below), will be mated with a liquid-cooling solution; and unless NVIDIA releases its dual-GPU GM200 graphics card any sooner, is on course to becoming the fastest graphics card you can buy. It remains to be seen if AMD can cash in on the Holiday shopping season.

AMD's ambitious Radeon Sofware Crimson Edition drivers are seeing its first user experience issue in the form of a fan-speed bug. The driver, in some cases, spins graphics card fans up to 100%, and in others, the fan-speed is locked at 30% regardless of load. Over the past weekend, AMD acknowledged the issue and is tasked with a hotfix driver scheduled for release later today.

A ominously named app claims to boost certain apps performance on AMD processors. Called "Intel Compiler Patcher," this app scans your machine for apps developed using Intel C++ compilers, and patches them to work better on non-Intel CPU platforms (namely AMD). The idea (suspicion rather), is that apps developed with Intel C++ compilers give modern AMD CPUs a performance disadvantage. The following is how the developer describes the app works:

The compiler or library can make multiple versions of a piece of code, each optimized for a certain processor and instruction set, for example SSE2, SSE3, etc. The system includes a function that detects which type of CPU it is running on and chooses the optimal code path for that CPU. This is called a CPU dispatcher. However, the Intel CPU dispatcher does not only check which instruction set is supported by the CPU, it also checks the vendor ID string. If the vendor string says "GenuineIntel" then it uses the optimal code path. If the CPU is not from Intel then, in most cases, it will run the slowest possible version of the code, even if the CPU is fully compatible with a better version.

We don't have an AMD machine at hand to put our benches ourselves, and so we invite AMD CPU users from our community to post their results by using this "patcher" at their own risk.DOWNLOAD: Intel Compiler Patcher