AMD published a paper with the IEEE for a new high-density computing device concept, which it calls the Exascale Heterogenous Processor or (EHP). It may be a similar acronym to APU (accelerated processing unit), but is both similar and different to it in many ways, which make it suitable for high-density supercomputing nodes. The EHP is a chip that has quite a bit in common with the recently launched "Fiji" GPU, that drives the company's flagship Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card.

The EHP is a combination of a main die, housing a large number of CPU cores, a large GPGPU unit, and an interposer, which connects the main die to 32 GB of HBM2 memory that's on-package, and is used as both main-memory and memory for the integrated GPGPU unit, without memory partitioning, using hUMA (heterogeneous unified memory access). The CPU component consists of 32 cores likely based on the "Zen" micro-architecture, using eight "Zen" quad-core subunits. There's no word on the CU (compute unit) count of the GPGPU core. The EHP in itself will be highly scalable. AMD hopes to get a working sample of this chip out by 2016-17.

AMD is reportedly giving final touches to the Radeon R7 370X, to preempt launch of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950. The card will be based on the "Trinidad XT" silicon, and will max out components physically present on the chip. This means that the card will feature 1,280 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB or 4 GB of memory. Leaked screenshots that disclose these specs suggest that AMD will carry over clock speeds from the R9 270X, working out to 1180 MHz core, and 5.60 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory, working out to a memory bandwidth of 179.2 GB/s.

AMD announced availability of its newest budget socket FM2+ APU, the A8-7670K. This part, like the recently-launched A10-7870K, is based on the company's new 28 nm "Godavari" silicon. It combines a quad-core x86-64 CPU based on the "Excavator" micro-architecture, with an integrated Radeon R7 series graphics core, featuring six Graphics CoreNext 1.2 compute units amounting to 384 stream processors; a dual-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller, with native support for DDR3-2133 MHz memory; and a PCI-Express gen 3.0 root complex.

The CPU cores on the AMD A8-7670K are clocked at 3.60 GHz, with maximum TurboCore frequency of 3.90 GHz. The CPU features unlocked base-clock multipliers, enabling CPU overclocking. The four CPU cores are spread across two "Excavator" modules, with a total of 4 MB of cache between them. The GPU is clocked at 757 MHz, and offers native support for DirectX 12 (feature level 12_0). It offers Dual-Graphics support, letting you pair it with select discrete GPUs from AMD's lineup. With the advent of DirectX 12, it should also support asynchronous multi-GPU. The A8-7670K is available now, and is priced at US $117.99 in its retail package.

It's been gloomy at the markets in the wake of the European economic crisis. This along with a revised quarterly outlook released by the company, hit AMD very hard over the past week. The AMD stock opened to a stock price of 1.87 down -0.09 or -4.59% at the time of writing this report, which sets the company's market capitalization at $1.53 billion. This is almost a quarter of what AMD paid to acquire ATI Technology, about a decade ago ($5.60 billion). Earlier this month, AMD took a steep fall of -15.59%, seeing its market cap drop by a quarter.

Intel is now worth $140.8 billion (92 times more), and NVIDIA $10.7 billion (7 times more). Among the issues affecting AMD are decline in PC sales and stiff competition. However, reasonably positive earnings put out by Intel disproves AMD's excuse that the market is to blame for bad performance, and the company could slide even further, hitting its all-time-low at the financial markets. The company will host an earnings call later today.

AMD today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2015 of $942 million, operating loss of $137 million, and net loss of $181 million, or $0.23 per share. Non-GAAP operating loss was $87 million and non-GAAP net loss was $131 million, or $0.17 per share.

"Strong sequential revenue growth in our EESC segment and channel business was not enough to offset near-term challenges in our PC processor business due to lower than expected consumer demand that impacted sales to OEMs," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We continue to execute our long-term strategy while we navigate the current market environment. Our focus is on developing leadership computing and graphics products capable of driving profitable share growth across our target markets."

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's claim that transistor counts in microprocessors can be doubled with 2 years, by means of miniaturizing silicon lithography is beginning to buckle. In its latest earnings release, CEO Brian Krzanich said that the company's recent product cycles marked a slowing down of its "tick-tock" product development from 2 years to close to 2.5 years. With the company approaching sub-10 nm scales, it's bound to stay that way.

To keep Moore's Law alive, Intel adopted a product development strategy it calls tick-tock. Think of it as a metronome that give rhythm to the company. Each "tock" marks the arrival of a new micro-architecture, and each "tick" marks its miniaturization to a smaller silicon fab process. Normally, each year is bound to see one of the two in alternation.

TUL Corporation, a leading and innovative manufacturer of AMD graphic cards since 1997, has proudly announced a new graphics card that has the capability of the highest gaming power in the most advanced GPU ever created for PC gaming. The PowerColor R9 Fury 4GB HBM is the world's first graphics card with AMD-pioneered High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated on-chip delivering 60% more memory bandwidth over GDDR5 powering performance and bleeding-edge technology.

HBM is a new type of memory chip with low power consumption, ultra-wide communication lanes, and a revolutionary new stacked configuration. HBM's vertical stacking and fast information transfer open the door for truly exciting performance in innovative form factors, not to mention that GPU applications are just the start - look for HBM's superior power efficiency and space savings to spark industry-wide innovation. PowerColor R9 Fury 4GB HBM easily handles the most graphically intense games today due to its advanced and innovative GPU to ever create for the beloved PC gaming community. This power comes from AMD-pioneered High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) integrated on-chip that delivers more than 3 times the bandwidth per watt over GDDR5 along with a 4096-bit memory interface for incredible new advances in power and efficiency which makes the most innovative total solution GPU available today.

GIGABYTE introduced a pair of custom-design Radeon R9 390 series graphics cards based on its new 2-slot WindForce 2X cooling solution, the R939WF2-8GD (R9 390) and the R939XWF2-8GD (R9 390X). The two are essentially the company's R9 390 series G1.Gaming products without the factory-overclock. Both cards are identical to their G1.Gaming siblings in every other way, except the branding and box-art. The two cards stick to AMD reference clock speeds, and offer 0 dBA idle cooling. The two should be cheaper than the G1.Gaming products.

LEPA announces the EXllusion 240, the liquid CPU cooler with 400W TDP cooling capacity. It is equipped with the dual patented CDP (Central Diffusing Passage) cold plate, 240mm radiator, and Dual-Convex-Blades fans for the powerful yet silent cooling. EXllusion 240 also features coolant refillable design, and included red, blue, green dyes allow users to customize the preferred coolant color. This facilitates modders to customize the tone of their coolant to their wildest imagination.

Unlike conventional liquid coolers, LEPA's R&D team created this predominantly semi-DIY liquid cooler that perfectly enhances both system performance and aesthetics. The EXllusion 240 includes red, blue, and green dyes which will give you the freedom to tone your coolant's color and compliment the system that you're building. The water block has a built-in power-on LED which enhances the illumination and brings additional color gradation.

Aqua Computer unveiled its full-coverage water block for the Radeon R9 Fury X graphics card. The block should also be compatible with the Sapphire R9 Fury Tri-X, which uses the AMD reference PCB. The block features exposed copper as its primary material, with an acrylic top. Its coolant channel directly flows over not just the GPU, but also the VRM area. The block itself is single-slot capable. It has threads for common G 1/4 fittings, and is capable of multi-GPU fittings. Available now, the block is priced at 99.99€ (including 19% VAT).

AMD announced the second graphics card based on its swanky new "Fiji" silicon, the Radeon R9 Fury. Positioned between the R9 390X and the R9 Fury X, this card offers higher pixel-crunching muscle than the R9 390X, while giving you cutting-edge 4 GB HBM memory. It can play any game at 2560 x 1440, and at Ultra HD (3840 x 2160), with reasonable eye-candy. The R9 Fury is designed solely for AMD's AIB partners to come up with their own air-cooled products.

AMD carved the R9 Fury out of the Fiji silicon, by enabling 56 of the 64 GCN compute units physically present, yielding 3,584 stream processors. Other specifications include 224 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4 GB of memory across a 4096-bit wide HBM interface. The core is clocked at 1000 MHz, and the memory at 500 MHz (512 GB/s). Custom-design boards will offer factory-overclocked speeds. AMD is pricing the R9 Fury at US $549.

Here are some of the first pictures of ASUS Radeon R9 Fury STRIX, detailed in no less than AMD's own [leaked] press-deck for the R9 Fury. It appears that only two AIB partners are going to launch the R9 Fury for whatever reason. These are the Sapphire, with its R9 Fury Tri-X card, and ASUS, with its R9 Fury STRIX. ASUS' card features the same new-generation triple-fan DirectCU III cooling solution that made its debut with the GTX 980 Ti STRIX, and is featured on the R9 390X STRIX. This cooler is mated to what appears to be the first custom-design PCB for AMD's "Fiji" silicon (Sapphire's card uses the reference AMD PCB carried over from the R9 Fury X). This card is firmly in the 30 cm-ish territory. Its display output configuration includes a DVI connector, apart from three DisplayPorts, and an HDMI connector. The cooler offers 0 dBA idle. AMD claims that the R9 Fury will offer higher performance than the GeForce GTX 980, and is hence expected to be priced in that range.

AMD has halted optimizations for its Mantle 3D graphics API, for current and future graphics cards. The cards will retain Mantle API support at the driver-level, to run existing Mantle applications, but will not receive any performance optimizations from AMD. Launched around 2013, Mantle had a short stint with AAA PC games, such as Battlefield 4, Thief, Sniper Elite III, and Star Citizen, offering noticeably higher performance than DirectX 11. The API improves the way the CPU-end of 3D graphics rendering is handled, particularly with today's multi-core/multi-threaded processors, bringing about significant increases to the number of draw-calls that can be parsed by a GPU.

AMD will now focus on DirectX 12 and Vulkan (OpenGL successor by Khronos Group). Why the company effectively killed its own 2-year old and promising 3D API is anyone's guess. We postulate that Mantle could have been used by AMD to steer Microsoft to introduce vital bare-metal optimizations it reserved for the console, to the PC ecosystem with DirectX 12. It appears to have served that purpose, and as if to hold up to its end of a bargain, AMD 'withdrew' Mantle. DirectX 12 will feature a super-efficient command-buffer that scales across any number of CPU cores, and will have huge increases in draw-calls over DirectX 11. The new API makes its official debut with Windows 10, later this month. AMD's Graphics CoreNext 1.1 and 1.2 GPUs support DirectX 12 (feature level 12_0), as do rival NVIDIA's "Maxwell" GPUs. The company will continue to nurture Mantle as an "innovation base" for its upcoming tech, such as LiquidVR.

AMD released the Catalyst 15.7 WHQL driver suite, its first WHQL-signed Catalyst driver in 212 days (since 14.12 Omega). These drivers add official support for all the new AMD Radeon R9 300 series and R9 Fury series graphics processors launched in the past two months, and comes with a ship load of new features and game optimizations. They also include WDDM 2.0 support, letting you use them with Windows 10.

To begin with, Catalyst 15.7 WHQL adds support for AMD FreeSync in CrossFire setups, on DirectX 10 and higher 3D applications. Features such as VSR (virtual super-resolution) and FRTC (frame-rate target control) are now official. CrossFire profiles have been added/improved for over a dozen games since 14.12 Omega. Frame-rates have been increased for Far Cry 4 and Tomb Raider.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 15.7 WHQL for Windows 8.1/10 64-bit | Windows 8.1/10 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

AMD today announced the new AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU, the world's first and fastest 32GB single-GPU server card for DGEMM heavy double-precision workloads, with support for OpenCL 2.0. Based on the second-generation AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture, this new addition to the AMD FirePro server GPU family is capable of delivering up to 5.24 TFLOPS of peak single precision compute performance while enabling full throughput double precision performance, providing up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance. Designed with compute-intensive workflows in mind, the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU is ideal for data center managers who oversee clusters within academic or government bodies, oil and gas industries, or deep neural network compute cluster development.

"AMD is recognized as an HPC industry innovator as the graphics provider with the top spot on the November 2014 Green500 List. Today the best GPU for compute just got better with the introduction of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU to complement AMD's impressive array of server graphics offerings for high performance compute environments," said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group. "The AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU can accelerate complex workloads in scientific computing, data analytics, or seismic processing, wielding an industry-leading 32GB of memory. We designed the new offering for supercomputers to achieve massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets."

Here are some of the first pictures of Sapphire's custom-design Radeon R9 Fury graphics card. The card features a triple-slot (or 2.2-slot) Tri-X cooling solution. Its PCB appears to be AMD reference-design (identical in design to the R9 Fury X), but cooled by a long triple-fan dual-stack heatsink, with over one-third of it being overhung. Quite a few GTX 970, GTX 670, and GTX 760 cards are known to have similar overhangs of coolers that are longer than the PCB.

The pics also come with leaked specs-sheets, which confirm its core configuration of 56 out of 64 compute units being enabled, yielding 3,584 stream processors; while leaving the 4 GB 4096-bit HBM memory untouched. The core clock speed is lower, at 1000 MHz, while the memory clock is left untouched at 500 MHz, compared to the R9 Fury X. Sapphire is also selling a factory-overclocked card with 1040 MHz core. The Radeon R9 Fury is expected to launch in mid-July (next week).

ASRock unveiled a pair of motherboards based on AMD A4-5000 "Kabini" quad-core SoCs, to compete with Intel Celeron "Braswell" based solutions. These include the mini-ITX QC5000M-ITX/PH, and the micro-ATX QC5000M. Both boards use passive metal heatsinks to cool the SoC, and are largely identical in their feature-sets, with the only exception being the QC5000M offers two additional PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots. The boards draw power from 24-pin ATX power connectors. The SoC is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots. Display outputs include D-Sub and HDMI. Among its modern connectivity options are 6-channel HD audio with ELNA capacitors, gigabit Ethernet, and a pair of USB 3.0 ports. The company didn't reveal pricing.

AMD today announced that revenue for the second quarter ended June 27, 2015 is expected to be lower than previously guided. The company now expects second quarter revenue to decrease approximately 8 percent sequentially, compared to the previous guidance of down 3 percent, plus or minus 3 percent. The sequential decrease is primarily due to weaker than expected consumer PC demand impacting the company's Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) APU sales. The company expects second quarter channel sales and channel inventory reduction efforts to be in-line with the company's plans.

The company anticipates non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 28 percent, compared to the previous non-GAAP guidance of approximately 32 percent primarily due to a higher mix of Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment sales and lower than anticipated Computing and Graphics segment APU unit volumes due to weaker than expected OEM PC product demand. Additionally the company anticipates GAAP gross margin to be further impacted by a one-time charge of approximately $33 million associated with a technology node transition from 20 nanometer (nm) to FinFET. The company started several product designs in 20 nm that will instead transition to the leading-edge FinFET node.

AMD's second graphics card based on its 28 nm "Fiji" silicon, the Radeon R9 Fury, will be an important SKU for the company. Ahead of its rumored mid-July launch, TweakTown got a whiff of its specifications from its sources. According to them, AMD will create the R9 Fury by enabling 56 of the 64 compute units on the silicon, yielding 3,584 stream processors. This sets the TMU count at 224. We doubt AMD will tinker with the render back-ends, and so the ROP count could remain at 64. The memory configuration could remain untouched, at 4 GB of 4096-bit HBM.

The clocks speeds on the R9 Fury will be the same as the R9 Fury X, at 1050 MHz core, and 500 MHz (512 GB/s) memory. One should expect temperatures of the R9 Fury to be higher, since it's being designed for air-cooled cards, although it's not expected to cross 75°C in typical gaming scenarios. Looking at the 12.5% drop in stream processors, one could expect the performance gap between the two Fury SKUs to be around 10-12%. This makes the R9 Fury a competitor to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980, if it's priced in its neighborhood (± $50).

ASUS is reportedly giving final touches to an air-cooled Radeon R9 Fury (that's Fury without the "X") graphics card, based on its new-generation STRIX cooling solution. Listings of the card appeared online, with German retailer Computer PC Shop asking 623.90€ (including VAT) for it. If you remove the 19% VAT, you arrive at a price-tag of around 500€. This card is known to feature ASUS' DirectCU III triple-fan cooling solution, which made its debut with the R9 390X and GTX 980 Ti STRIX graphics cards. As for the SKU itself, the specs of the R9 Fury remain a mystery. AMD could lower the clocks, reduce the stream processor count, or a combination or the two. It still features 4 GB of HBM. Evidently, AMD allows its AIB partners to come up with custom-design boards for this SKU, which means a reference-design board is unlikely.

AMD today unveiled innovation in heterogeneous high performance computing (HPC) by delivering more than 1.5 petaFLOPS of AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU performance for the Next Generation Sequencing Centre (NGSC) at the Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw in support of bioinformatics research related to next generation sequencing (NGS) studies. The new ORION cluster features 150 Dell PowerEdge R730 servers with two AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs, for a total GPU peak of 1.52 petaFLOPS single precision and 0.76 petaFLOPS double precision performance. The energy-efficient cluster enables high speed and efficient calculations for genomic data, applicable to a range of genomics and bioinformatics studies, using a fast and power efficient OpenCL implementation for research applications.

"We're committed to building our HPC leadership position in the industry as a foremost provider of computing applications, tools and technologies," said Sean Burke, corporate vice-president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. "This installation reaffirms AMD's leading role in HPC with the implementation of the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs in this 1.5 petaFLOPS supercomputer cluster. AMD and Dell are enabling OpenCL applications for critical science research usage for this cluster. AMD is proud to collaborate with Dell and NGSC to support such important life science and computer science research."

AMD seems to have reacted swiftly to feedback from reviewers and owners of initial batches if its Radeon R9 Fury X, over a noisy pump-block; and revised its design. The revised pump-block lacks the "high pitched whine" that users were reporting, according to owners. At this point there are no solid visual cues on how to identify a card with the new block, however a user with the revised card (or at least one that lacks the whine), pointed out a 2-color chrome Cooler Master (OEM) badge on the pump-block, compared to the multi-color sticker on pump-blocks from the initial batches. You can open up the front-plate covering the card without breaking any warranties.

It will be a while before you see custom-design variants of the Radeon R9 Fury X, which is a halo product to AMD, much like the GTX TITAN series for NVIDIA. In the mean time, you can customize its front-plate (the rubbery-textured front cover of the cooler shroud). AMD put out 3D models of the front-plate along with a few simple instructions on how to remove and replace it. With basic 3D printing know-how, and equipment, you can 3D-print your own front-plate design. Find the 3D model files and instructions here.

AMD today announced that zSpace has chosen AMD FirePro W5170M graphics to power the new zSpace for Education enabling real world virtual reality in the classroom. Unlike other VR solutions, AMD FirePro professional graphics-powered zSpace for Education delivers interaction and group collaboration through a VR precision 'stylus' to naturally access the virtual experience matched with a head-tracking computer display in an innovative, all-in-one design.

The zSpace for Education solution features an easy-to-use interface that is natural and intuitive. zSpace will implement AMD's LiquidVR technology, harnessing AMD GPU hardware sub-systems to make the virtual reality experience as comfortable and as realistic as possible. "AMD is proud to work with zSpace to power their new real world virtual reality solution," said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics Group. "AMD FirePro professional graphics deliver the features and horsepower required for this innovative new product which requires exceptional visual performance."

Micron Technology announced during its Q3 FY-2015 earnings call, that it began shipping GDDR5 memory chips based on its 20 nm-class node. The company is reportedly shipping 8 Gb (1 gigabyte) GDDR5 memory chips. The company was last reported to be acquiring Japanese DRAM major Elpida, which also supplies GDDR5 chips to graphics cards, notebooks, and game console makers. The GDDR5 memory space has been saturated by companies such as Samsung and SK Hynix. The memory standard itself is on the brink of becoming obsolete; with AMD implementing HBM on its new high-end GPU, and NVIDIA expected to implement HBM with its upcoming "Pascal" GPU family. There is still quite a few GDDR5-equipped graphics cards to be sold, before HBM takes over GPUs of all market segments.