AMD announced a new SKU to heat up the sub-$200 market segment, the Radeon R9 270. A slightly tuned down sibling of the Radeon R9 270X, the R9 270 is based on the 28 nm "Curacao" silicon, and features a similar core-configuration to it. The chip features the same 1,280 stream processor-count as the R9 270X, with 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory, but features lower clock speeds, at 900 to 925 MHz core (PowerTune with Boost), and 5.60 GHz memory (GDDR5-effective), which churns out 179 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Its TDP is rated at 170W, and the card draws power from a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The GPU supports the latest APIs, including DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and Mantle. The card starts at $179.99.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphic cards, today introduces a new flavor into R9 series, the PowerColor R9 270 OC. Built with AMD's latest GPU, Curacao, the R9 270 OC is based on 28nm processor and offering PC enthusiastic with cutting-edge technology, including Microsoft DirectX 11.2, AMD CrossFireTM technology, and ultra resolution gaming, ensuring unrivaled performance.

The PowerColor R9 270 OC has set up to overclock 30MHz faster than its reference design, even up to 955MHz with boost, together with 1400MHz of memory clock, guarantee gamers to have the best gaming experience. Using high performance 256-bit of 2GB GDDR5 memory, and 1280 stream processors, the R9 270 OC promise an immersive experience with no-compromise performance and flawless image quality.

AMD today announced that the company and its subsidiary, AMD International Sales & Service, Ltd. (collectively, the "Borrowers"), have entered into a loan and security agreement for a principal amount up to $500 million (the "Secured Revolving Line of Credit") with a group of lenders and Bank of America, N.A. acting as agent for the lenders. The proceeds of the Secured Revolving Line of Credit may be used for general corporate purposes, including working capital needs. Availability under the Secured Revolving Line of Credit is limited to a borrowing base of 85% of eligible accounts receivable, less certain reserves. The obligations under the Secured Revolving Line of Credit are secured by the Borrowers' accounts receivable and inventory. The five-year Secured Revolving Line of Credit will mature on November 12, 2018. No drawings were made under the Secured Revolving Line of Credit on the closing date of the loan agreement.

"We have made significant progress during the last year strengthening our capital structure to support our strategic growth plans," said Devinder Kumar, AMD senior vice president and chief financial officer. "We expect to end the fourth quarter of 2013 with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, including long-term marketable securities, balances of approximately $1.2 billion and remain committed to maintaining ongoing balances of approximately $1.1 billion, our target optimal level. This secured revolving line of credit provides AMD with greater financial flexibility as we continue transforming AMD for growth across a more diverse set of markets."

AMD kicked off its 2013 Developer Summit (APU13) today, announcing a new unified Software Development Kit (SDK,) an improved CodeXL tool suite with added features and support for the latest AMD hardware, and added heterogeneous acceleration in popular Open Source libraries. Together, these tools provide a substantial step forward in productivity and ease-of-use for developers wishing to harness the full power of modern heterogeneous platforms spanning form servers to PCs to handheld devices.

"Developers are essential to our mission of realizing the full potential of modern computing technologies," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Solutions, AMD. "Enriching the developer experience by harnessing these technologies is a critical part of AMD's mission to accelerate developer adoption."

AMD today announced it is enabling its accelerated processing units (APU) for next-generation servers through important advancements in software tools developed by AMD and in collaboration with technology partners and the open source community. In his keynote address at APU13, AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers highlighted the significant progress AMD has made in both developing software internally and empowering others to develop software to take advantage of the capabilities of AMD APU technology, which combines industry leading AMD Radeon graphics processing engines with x86 computational processing on a single chip.

"Servers must be efficient, scalable and adaptable to meet the compute characteristics of new and changing workloads. Software applications that leverage server APUs are designed to drive highly efficient, low-power, dense server solutions optimized for highly parallel and multimedia workloads," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. "We have evolved our processor roadmap to support this opportunity, and now we are showcasing how the APU software ecosystem is gaining momentum and what developers can do to participate."

Colorfire, the AMD Radeon wing of Colorful, announced its Radeon R9 290 graphics card. The card sticks to the reference design (a first for Colorful/Colorfire), and features reference clock speeds of 947 MHz core, and 5.00 GHz memory (GDDR5-effective). Based on the 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the Radeon R9 290 features 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. We expect the company to roll out the card in Greater China region only.

AMD has made available a fresh beta build of the Catalyst 13.11 graphics driver. This latest release is the Beta 9.2 and it brings improved anti-aliasing performance in Call of Duty: Ghost (and an updated CrossFire profile for the game), a PowerTune tweak to 'reduce variance of fan speed / RPM' on Radeon R9 290 Series cards, plus fixes for crashing bugs seen in legacy DirectX 9 applications.

The Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.2 is available for Windows 8.1/8/7 and features support for the Radeon R9, R7, HD 7000, HD 6000 and HD 5000 Series cards.

Downloads: Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.2 for Windows

Club 3D announced its Radeon R9 290 graphics card (model: CGAX-R9298). Sticking to AMD's reference board design, the card offers 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. The card also sticks to AMD's reference clock speeds of 948 MHz core, and 5.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory, which works out to a memory bandwidth figure of 320 GB/s. Expect this card to be priced on par with other reference-design R9 290 cards, at a stunning $399.99.

HIS rolled out its Radeon R9 290 Fan graphics card. The "Fan" series from HIS includes graphics cards based on reference designs, and this card is no different. It also sticks to AMD's reference clock speeds of 948 MHz core, and 5.00 GHz memory. The Radeon R9 290 features 2,560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. Like most other reference design R9 290 graphics card, the HIS R9 290 Fan will be priced at $399.99.

AMD today announced that the SeaMicro SM15000 server supports bare metal features in OpenStack Compute. AMD's SeaMicro SM15000 server is ideally suited for massive OpenStack deployments by integrating compute, storage and networking into a 10 rack unit system.

The system is built around the Freedom fabric, the industry's premier supercomputing fabric for scale out data center applications. The Freedom fabric disaggregates compute, storage and network I/O to provide the most flexible, saleable and resilient data center infrastructure in the industry. This allows customers to match the compute performance, storage capacity and networking I/O to their application needs. The result is an adaptive data center where any server can be mapped to any hard disk/SSD or network I/O to expand capacity or recover from a component failure.

XFX rolled out its Radeon R9 290 Core Edition graphics card (model: R9-290A-ENFC), which sticks to AMD's reference board design, and tops it up with minimal company branding. The card also sticks to AMD reference clock speeds of 948 MHz core, and 5.00 GHz memory. Based on the 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the Radeon R9 290 features 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, four tessellation units, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. The R9 290 is priced at $399.

ASUS today announced the launch of R9 290, a new graphics card powered by the latest AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics-processing unit (GPU). The new card benefits from exclusive ASUS GPU Tweak, an easy-to-use tuning tool for instant performance boosts, 4GB of super-fast GDDR5 memory for the best gaming experience at the highest resolutions and incorporates AMD Eyefinity and TrueAudio technologies to enable expansive multi-display setups and bring in-game audio to life with more accurate environmental sounds. R9 290 also includes support for both DirectX 11.2 and AMD's new Mantle application programming interface (API) for great handling of even the most-demanding PC games.

Gigabyte joined the Radeon R9 290 launch party with its own card, the GV-R929D5-4GD-B, which sticks to AMD's reference design board, without too many stickers. The card also sticks to AMD's reference clocks speeds of 948 MHz core, and 5.00 GHz memory. Based on the 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the Radeon R9 290 features 2,560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. Expect the card to go for $399.99.

Sapphire announced its Radeon R9 290 graphics card, which sticks to AMD's reference design, and tops it up with its own branding and artwork. Based on the 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon, the card features 2560 stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. Sapphire is pricing its card at US $399.99.

A renowned brand of graphics card maker - VTX3D, today introduced the newest graphics card of R9 series, the VTX3D R9 290 X-Edition. Being the highest end graphics solution, the R9 290 X-Edition is based on AMD's latest GCN architecture, equipped with the new AMD TrueAudio technology and AMD Eyefinity technology. Now gamers can get the most immersive PC gaming experience from the powerful graphics card.

Being the high end graphics card, the R9 290 X-Edition has unexceptionable equipment. Equipped with high standard 4GB of GDDR5 memory connected via 512 bit memory interface. By overclock setting, the R9 290 X-Edition clocks at 975 MHz core and 1250MHz (5.0Gbps) memory speed, performing the fastest and smoothest gaming experiences. In addition, the R9 290 X-Edition fully supports DirectX 11.2 and Windows 8.1 that enable all gamers to break the graphics performance of limitation and get the incredible experiences.

MSI is pleased to announce that the new AMD R9 290 is available now for gamers shift away from the mainstream Full HD resolution and enter the work of 4K/UltraHD! Built on the refined Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architeture, featuring more advanced PowerTune power management, improved display connection flexibility and most importantly enthusiast-level gaming performance. Additionally, the new AMD R9 290 supports the latest industry standards such as Windows 8.1, DirectX11.2, OpenGL 4.3, OpenCL 1.2 and the new Mantle interface which leverages the next-gen console technology and Radeon Graphics. UltraHD or "4K" (4Kx2K resolution) is also supported over both DisplayPort and HDMI and supports up to six independent concurrent displays.

The new Hawaii Pro GPU powering the R9 290 runs at speeds up to 948 MHz and is packed with 4 GB of high speed GDDR5 to power your games running at the highest resolutions and with maximum detail settings. AMD's PowerTune technology controls Thermals, Power and Performance to maximize performance and minimize power consumption.

AMD announced the Radeon R9 290, its second graphics card based on the swanky new "Hawaii" silicon. The card is a slight cut-down of the R9 290X, and features 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. The core is clocked at 948 MHz, and the memory at 5.00 GHz, churning out a memory bandwidth of 320 GB/s. The reference design board of the R9 290 is practically identical to its older sibling. AMD is pricing the card at an impressive $399, a price at which it will make both the $330 GeForce GTX 770 and the $499 GeForce GTX 780 look repulsively overpriced. Non-reference boards are expected to arrive by late-November, in time for last-minute X'mas purchases.

AMD today announced three new game developer partnerships for Mantle, its highly acclaimed, groundbreaking graphics API. Cloud Imperium Games, Eidos-Montréal, a part of the Square Enix Group, and Oxide Games are the latest game developers to join AMD in optimizing the way PC games are developed to extract maximum performance from a modern graphics architecture that spans desktop PCs, notebooks and consumer devices like tablets.

"AMD is proud to play an instrumental role in transforming the world of game development with Mantle," said Ritche Corpus, director of ISV gaming and alliances, AMD. "With the support and close collaboration between AMD and industry-leading game developers like Cloud Imperium, Eidos-Montréal and Oxide, Mantle can maximize optimization for highly anticipated PC titles, bringing an unparalleled gaming experience for players."

MSRP (before taxes) pricing of AMD's upcoming Radeon R9 290 (non-X) being around $450 is looking increasingly likely. In a string of reports that Japanese publication Hermitage Akihabara published ahead of launches of the R9 290X and the R9 290, in which the publication talked about pricing in the country, a price difference of roughly 18 percent is emerging between the two. Applying that to the $549.99 MSRP of the R9 290X stateside, one can derive a $450 pricing for the R9 290. Granted, local taxation may greatly vary between Japan and other markets, affecting the end-user price, but pre-tax MSRPs can be consistent.

The Radeon R9 290 is expected to launch on the 5th of November, 2013. Based on the same "Hawaii" silicon as the Radeon R9 290X, it features 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. Its core is clocked around 948 MHz, and memory at 5.00 GHz.

One month ago, Enermax informed about the introduction of a new product line which is specially designed for the requirements of modern gaming machines. "Ahead of the Game" covers different PC areas. "The models of our new series allow for a game play on the highest level. They are the perfect choice for high-end systems and provide leading technology for the pure joy of gaming", explains Benjamin Schäfer, PR/Marketing Team Leader of Enermax Europe. With the midi tower iVektor, the first gaming series from Enermax made a perfect market debut. The racing-style chassis with the soft-grip coating offers a variety of functions and many possibilities for system upgrades. But for a steady flow of game at highest resolution, the hardware inside is the crucial factor.

Schäfer: "We offer users the perfect starter set to build up a performance-capable and at the same time durable gaming system. Most often, people focus on the graphics card or CPU only. But at the end, the power supply decides how stable a PC runs. If your system is crashing down regularly, the PSU might be a possible source of trouble. Therefore, it is worthwhile to spend more money in a quality brand product instead of buying the cheapest of the cheap models. And if you consider about an efficient cooling system, you need to know that you can not only prolong the lifetime of the installed components, but you can also draw the ultimate performance out of your hardware. You will only achieve the highest clock rates if you rely on the best cooling solution."

As a follow-up to our older article on how December-January will play out for AMD's next-generation APU lineup, we have news that the company will unveil, or at least tease its next-generation desktop APU, codename "Kaveri," on November 11, 2013. It's when the company will host its APU'13 event, modeled along the lines of GPU'13, held in Hawaii this September, where it unveiled its Radeon R9 200 and R7 200 GPU families. On its backdrop, the company will also hold its 2013 AMD Developer Summit, which brings together developers making software that take advantage of both CPU and OpenCL-accelerated GPUs. APU'13 will be held in San Jose, USA, and like GPU'13, will be live-streamed to the web. In addition to new APUs, the company is expected to make some big announcements with its HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) initiative that brought some big names in the industry on board.The agenda for APU'13 follows.

Hightech Information System (HIS) today proudly announces the HIS R9 270X IceQX² Turbo Boost Clock 2GB GDDR5. The new card is OC and features faster Boost Clock, IceQ X² is Cooler and Quieter, user-friendly iTurbo and Long Lasting Design. Armed with iPower design, the extra PWM phases provide the card with higher and more stable power output which leads to a better-than-expected overclocking. In comparison with 1000MHz of the reference board, the core clock of the card has been by default set at 1100MHz.

With the latest technologies and features of R9 270X chipset, the card provides an all-round graphic experience to all users. The state-of-the-art IceQX² coolers empower the card with the best cooling solution. The card is cooler than the reference design and is below 28dB during watching movies, surfing on internet and ordinary working. Even when graphic-intensive gaming is being played, the card still remains at very quiet level.

The TechPowerUp HWBOT team, in partnership with Intel, is announcing the TechPowerUp HWBOT Competition 2013. Spread across three tests which anyone can participate in - 3DMark 2001, 3DMark 03, and SuperPi 32M, the competition gives you the chance to win some cool new gear, including a Core i7-4770K quad-core processor, an AMD CPU and motherboard combo, and a PayPal cash prize. The contest is open from November 1, 2013 to December 15, 2013.

For more information, visit this page.

TechPowerUp announced GPU-Z 0.7.4, the latest version of the popular PC graphics subsystem information, monitoring, and diagnostics utility. Version 0.7.4 introduces support for several of the recently launched, and upcoming high-end graphics chips, including Radeon R9 290X, Radeon R9 290, and Radeon R9 270; from AMD's stable, and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti from NVIDIA. Among the other chips supported from the two, include the Radeon HD 8280, HD 7310; and GeForce GT 635, and Quadro K3100M.

GPU-Z 0.7.4 also introduces a number of fixes, including accuracy in reporting release date of the Radeon R9 280X, die-size of AMD "Tahiti," ROP counts on Intel "Haswell" and "Ivy Bridge" IGPs. The new GPU-Z also lets you extract video BIOS from AMD Radeon cards even without any driver for the GPU being installed. The mini stress-test that clogs the PCIe bus interface, forcing it to run at maximum possible speeds (thereby giving you an accurate picture of the PCIe configuration), can now be paused by left-clicking the stress render window. A few rare crashes with systems running Intel IGPs, were addressed.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.7.4 | GPU-Z 0.7.4 ASUS ROG-themed

The change-log follows.

As promised yesterday, AMD has issued a new Catalyst 13.11 driver build to fix the crashing bug reported by Battlefield 4 players with Windows 8 machines. This release is the Beta8 and it contains all the goodies of previous builds. The driver is available for Windows 8.1/8/7 and features support for the Radeon R9, R7, HD 7000, HD 6000 and HD 5000 Series cards.

Download: Catalyst 13.11 Beta8 for Windows