At the AMD & HardOCP Game Experience event held in Texas, gamers were asked to participate in a blind test. The test involved gaming on two sets of gaming PCs with two PCs each, in each set is an AMD-powered PC, and an Intel-powered one. Participants weren't disclosed which PC was driven by what, as they were assembled in identical-looking cases (no window), with identical monitors and other peripherals. The first set is of budget single-monitor HD gaming, while the second set is high-end three-monitor gaming.

After gaming on both rigs in each set, respondents were asked to tick on a sheet of paper, which rig gave them a better gaming experience, or if gaming both had no observable difference. AMD went into this exercise expecting that most respondents will select "no difference" as their option, and so that would bring good PR to AMD, but to their surprise, most respondents selected the rigs that was powered by AMD processors.

Here is the first GPU-Z screenshot of a Radeon HD 7950 graphics card. Although put into a screenshot with ASUS GPU Tweak tool and Republic of Gamers-themed GPU-Z, the card doesn't appear to be an ASUS-made one, and is more likely HIS or PowerColor. The device ID checks out with the one HD 7950 has been associated with. Most other features match expectations. The HD 7950 is carved out of the 28 nm "Tahiti" GPU, with 28 GCN compute units (CUs) active, totaling 1,792 stream processors and 112 TMUs. The ROP count is untouched at 32, so is the memory, that's 3 GB GDDR5 across a 384-bit wide memory interface. With a memory clock of 5.00 GHz effective, it's churning out 240 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It's just the core clock speed where we weren't on target (from the previously-expected 800 MHz), either 880 MHz is the reference core clock speed of HD 7950, or this particular card is a factory-OC variant (PowerColor HD 7950 PCS?).

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that its AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor family, based on the new "Bulldozer" architecture, was chosen as the winner of The Linley Group's first annual Analysts' Choice Awards. The awards recognize the top processor products of 2011 in several major categories including embedded, mobile, PC, server, design IP and related technology. To choose each winner, the Linley Group's team of technology analysts focused on merits of the leading products that began shipping between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011.

"Our analysts are deeply familiar with processor products and technology, having conducted extensive research in order to deliver the firm's popular publications and reports," said Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at The Linley Group. "We chose the winners on the basis of their performance, power, features and cost as appropriate for their target applications."

Without making much noise ASUS has made available, in Germany at least, a new, Fusion-flavored (or should we say heterogeneous-heavy?) Eee PC, the 10.1-inch R051BX. Available in black (but coming soon in white), this netbook weights 1.17 kg, and has an LED-backlit (1024 x 600) display, an AMD C-50 (dual x86 cores @ 1.0 GHz, Radeon HD 6250 graphics) APU, 1 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, and a 2,200 mAh battery.

The Eee PC R051BX has Windows 7 Starter pre-installed and costs 259 Euro.

While it may not be as high profile as the Windows 8/ARM pair, Android/ x86 is still a match with potential. It certainly has a long way to go but progress is being made, and proof of that progress was seen at CES 2012 where AMD showcased a MSI WindPad 110W tablet running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

The WindPad 110W packed a Z-01 APU (two x86 cores @ 1.0 GHz, Radeon HD 6250 graphics), 2 GB of RAM, and was available for some hands-on time, unlike the Tegra 3-powered Windows 8 tablet also seen at CES. Things weren't perfect with the 110W/Android 4.0 mix as the tablet did experience occasional freezes but keep in mind it's all a work in progress. People interested in converting their WindPad 110W from a Windows device to an (experimental) Android tablet can download the Android 4.0 for Brazos ISO via this page.

Making silicon chips is not easy, requiring hugely expensive fabs, with massive clean-room environments and at every process shrink, the complexity and difficulty of making the things goes up significantly. It looks like TSMC and GlobalFoundries are both having serious yield problems with their 28 nm process nodes, according to Mike Bryant, technology analyst at Future Horizons and this is causing a rash of non-working wafers - to the point of having nothing working with some chip designs submitted for production. It seems that the root cause of these problems are to do with the pressures of bringing products to market, rather than an inherent problem with the technology; it just takes time that they haven't got to iron out the kinks and they're getting stuck: "Foundries have come under pressure to release cell libraries too early - which end up with designs that don't work," Bryant said. In an effort to try and be seen to treat every customer equally, TSMC is attempting to launch ten 28 nm designs from seven companies, but it's not working out too well: "At 45-nm, only NVIDIA was affected. At 28-nm any problems for TSMC will be problems for many customers" said Bryant.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, our popular video subsystem information and diagnostic utility that provides you with accurate information about the graphics hardware installed, and lets you monitor their clock speeds, fan speeds, voltages, VRAM consumption, etc., in real-time. Version 0.5.8 introduces two new features. The first one is a render test that applies sufficient load (not stress) on the GPU to pull it out of PCI-Express link-state power-management, to ensure the Bus information is accurate. If you find the PCI-Express bus link speed or PCIe version displayed incorrectly, simply click on the "?" button next to the field to launch the load test.

The next new feature is ASIC quality, designed for NVIDIA Fermi (GF10x and GF11x GPUs) and AMD Southern Islands (HD 7800 series and above), aimed at advanced users, hardware manufacturers, and the likes. We've found the ways in which AMD and NVIDIA segregate their freshly-made GPU ASICs based on the electrical leakages the chips produce (to increase yield by allotting them in different SKUs and performance bins), and we've found ways in which ASIC quality can be quantified and displayed. Find this feature in the context menu of GPU-Z. We're working on implementing this feature on older AMD Radeon GPUs.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.8, TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.8 ASUS ROG Themed

The full change-log follows.

Swiss company Arctic (formerly Arctic Cooling), has used the brand name "Fusion" on its PSU products well before AMD's so-called "Fusion" APU family came to be. Arctic was smart enough to register its trademark, and is now piling up ammo to take AMD to court over alleged trademark infringement. Arctic acquired the brand name "Fusion" from Boot Up International Ltd., and its Fusion trademark is valid in Europe. Still a sizable market for AMD.

The interesting part is, AMD doesn't use "Fusion" as a brand name anywhere, except maybe its company slogan "The future is fusion", where "fusion" is used as a verb (fusion of various computing technologies to give a homogenous computing experience), and the company internally referring to its APU architecture as "Fusion", on the outside though, AMD brands its APUs under its Vision processor family, with no "Fusion" branding anywhere, except the company slogan.

AMD might be a little sore that its "Zambezi" FX processor family based on its much-hyped "Bulldozer" architecture didn't quite meet the performance expectations of a ground-up new CPU architecture, but it doesn't want to take chances and build hype around the architecture that succeeds it. From various sources, some faintly-reliable, we have been hearing that the next-generation of high-performance desktop processors based on "Piledriver" architecture, codenamed "Vishera", will pack five modules or 10 cores, and will be structured essentially like Zambezi, since Piledriver is basically a refinement of Bulldozer architecture. The latest leak comes from the Software Optimization Guide for AMD 15h family (read here), which was picked up by CPU World while most of us were busy with CES.

CPU World compiled most of the features of what it suspected to be AMD referring to its future processors based on the Piledriver architecture, that's "Vishera" (desktop high-performance), "Terramar" (high-density server), and "Sepang" (small-medium business server) parts. The three are not the first chips to be based on Piledriver, AMD has a new mainstream desktop and notebook APU in the works codenamed "Trinity", which is en route for a little later this year. Trinity basically has an identical CPUID instruction-set as Vishera, Terramar, and Sepang, confirming their common lineage compared to today's "Bulldozer" architecture. The most catchy detail is of Vishera featuring 4 DDR3 channels.

This month-end, AMD will launch the second product in its high-end Radeon HD 7900 series, the HD 7950, which is based on the same "Tahiti" silicon as the HD 7970, but with a few components disabled. Reliable sources revealed to DonanimHaber the reference clock speeds of the HD 7950. The core of the HD 7950 will be clocked at 800 MHz, and the memory at 1250 MHz (actual), 5.00 GHz (GDDR5 effective). This, compared to the 925 MHz (core), 1375 MHz (memory actual)/ 5.50 GHz (memory effective) clock speeds of the HD 7970. The HD 7950 will hence be a good overclocker considering the speeds it comes with, there is scope for quite a few factory-OC models from AIBs. In related news, DonanimHaber notes that the HD 7950 on average will be US $100-150 cheaper than the HD 7970 (US $400-$450).

Introduced last summer at the Fusion11 Developer Summit, AMD's Fusion System Architecture (FSA) has now been renamed to Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA). According to AMD corporate fellow Phil Rogers, the new name is (more) 'representative of the entire, technical community that is leading the way in this very important area of technology and programming development.'

Naming change aside, AMD's solution remains the same and promotes the use of CPU and GPU cores in a unified way, so as to deliver high application performance and low power consumption.

Aeolus Gamer Storm designed a variant of its Dracula GPU heatsink for AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. The heatsink is designed to handle thermal loads of up to 250W, when outfitted with fans. The heatsink design consists of a nickel-plated copper base (this particular variant has a circular bump where the GPU die makes contact), with the appropriate mount-hole spacing for HD 7970. Through this base, six 6 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat-pipes pass, the opposite ends of these heat pipes pass through two aluminum fin stacks. Tests show that when fitted with two 80 mm fans spinning at 1,800 RPM, the Dracula keeps load temperatures of the HD 7970 about 35 degrees Celsius cooler than AMD reference fan-heatsink.

After showing to the world its Radeon HD 7970 PCB with all components placed, Yeston disclosed pictures of exactly what it's going to use to cool the beast. Yeston's cooling solution uses two big (probably 120 mm) fans inspired by the design of aircraft turbofans, with 18 blades on its impeller. Such impellers with PC cooling fans aren't new, and have been used in case fans designed by the likes of Cooler Master. However, this could be the first time such fans have been used in a VGA cooler.

Underneath the frame holding the two fans is a large aluminum fin stack-type heatsink that spans almost the entire area of the PCB. A copper base makes contact with the GPU, from it, six copper heat pipes originate, conveying heat to two aluminum fin stacks, which are then ventilated by the two fans. When fully assembled, the cooler is so large that it appears to span across almost four expansion slots. Yeston is reportedly still working on improving the design. Let's hope it gets a lot slimmer than that.

After releasing two versions based on Intel Atom processors, Sapphire is now preparing an Edge HD nettop/mini PC which is based around an AMD APU (accelerated processing unit). Showcased at CES 2012, the AMD-flavored Edge HD3 is equipped with an E-450 chip (boasting two 1.65 GHz Bobcat cores and Radeon HD 6320 graphics), 4 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, LAN, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, D-Sub and HDMI outputs, and USB 3.0 connectivity.

Reportedly, the Edge HD3 will become available on February 1st, priced at $300.

AMD today announced the first AMD Fusion Center of Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, designed to focus on the innovative developer environment and software performance advancements enabled by heterogeneous computing. The center will fund, mentor and promote new commercial enterprises emerging from the vast intellectual property and research expertise in the University of Illinois community.

The University has been a hotbed of new start-ups since the creation of the first widespread web browser - Mosaic - developed by Marc Andreessen in 1992. Through access to AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) technology and platforms, the AMD Fusion Center of Innovation will help bridge access to new AMD heterogeneous computing technology with the innovative spirit stimulated and nurtured on campus.

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 seems to have ruffled a few feathers at NVIDIA and it looks like the green team doesn't want too much market exposure for it. A fairly-reliable source at ChipHell learned that NVIDIA's GeForce "GTX 680" part could be launched some time in February. The source says that this part could be competitive with the HD 7970, though not exactly NVIDIA's fastest next-generation GPU in the works. So it has to be something other than the GeForce Kepler 110, that's reportedly slated for March-April. At least the tiny pieces of specifications trickling out seem to reinforce this theory. Graphics cards based on this part apparently have 2 GB of memory, and its core clock speed is reported to be 780 MHz.

While many might think that "Ultrabook" is a generic term for a new performance ultra-portable notebook form-factor, it is a registered trademark of Intel, which governs the specifications of what qualifies to be an Ultrabook. Intel will launch a well-defined Ultrabook platform based on its third-generation Core processor family, codenamed "Ivy Bridge", later this year. Meanwhile, AMD is finalizing a performance ultra-portable specification of its own, powered by its next-generation "Trinity" accelerated processing units (APUs), which it will call "Ultrathin".

Ultrathin will be designed to offer competitive CPU performance to Ultrabook, and superior GPU performance to it, at target prices 10-20 percent lower than Ultrabook. In 2012, while Intel bagged about 75 design wins for its Ultrabook platform, AMD claims to have already won 20. AMD's Ultrathin platform will have advantages over Intel's Ultrabook with regards to platform and component costs. The average AMD Ultrathin with $100~$200 cheaper than the average Intel Ultrabook. Some notebook vendors are concerned that a competitive platform to Intel Ultrabook could result in a price-war between the two platforms, and end up reducing the prices of the now profitable-looking performance ultraportable segment.

Chinese AMD Radeon add-in board (AIB) partner and motherboard major Yeston, displayed a Radeon HD 7970 PCB, which bears the AMD branding, and is reportedly AMD's cost-effective "Tahiti" PCB. It is quite likely that this PCB will be used for Radeon HD 7950, apart from affordable HD 7970 cards. Radeon HD 7950, like its costlier sibling, will have a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

Its designers seems to have done some clever cost-cutting which will make cards based on it more affordable (or at least more profitable), without sacrificing quality much. The PCB uses a 8+1+1 phase VRM, consisting of cost-effective ferrite core chokes, LFPAK MOSFETs, and probably a UPI-made VRM controller. Yeston will most likely use a top-flow cooler, and hence made room for two DVI connectors next to one each of HDMI 1.4a and standard DisplayPort 1.2. The dual-BIOS feature of AMD's high-end reference HD 7970 PCB is blanked out on this PCB.

Originally slated for 9th January, and reportedly delayed to February, AMD's second high-end graphics card based on the Tahiti silicon, the Radeon HD 7950 will make it for a late-January launch, sources within add-in board (AIB) partners told DigiTimes. Previous reports mentioned that Radeon HD 7950, when it is launched, will be accompanied with market-availability. In related news, while all Radeon HD 7000M mobile GPUs launched by AMD so far are rebrands from previous generations, it does have designs of 28 nm mobile GPUs based on its new Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture in the pipeline, which will take up Radeon HD 7900M/7800M/7700M series, which will be launched in Q2, 2012.

Anno 2070's Draconian DRM: Guru3D's Graphics Card Review Killed Off (UPDATED)

Hilbert Hagedoorn of well-known PC tech review site guru3d.com recently bought a copy of Ubisoft's Anno 2070 and wanted to use it in one of his graphics card reviews. However, he became badly unstuck. This game comes on the Steam platform and the store page states: "3rd-party DRM: Solidshield Tages SAS 3 machine activation limit". Unfortunately for Guru3D, they found out exactly what this means, which resulted in just one performance graph, an aborted review, an unplayable game - and bad publicity for Ubisoft once again. They have published an article about their experience, pledging not to use their titles again because of this DRM.

PowerColor's parent company, TUL, showed off its barebones Mini-PC at CES. Its main unit measures just 165 x 165 x 55 mm (LxWxH), and is available in black and white color options. Under the hood is an AMD G-Series embedded APU, backed by Hudson M1 FCH chipset. It takes in 1 DDR3-SODIMM module, up to 4 GB in size, and runs it at speeds of up to PC3-8500 (DDR3-1066 MHz). The G-Series APU provides AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics, with DVI and HDMI display outputs. The mini PC barebone has room for one 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s drive. Its front-panel offers one USB 2.0 port (USB 3.0 can be opted for), a multi-format card reader, and eSATA 6 Gb/s. Its rear panel connectivity includes 2-channel audio outputs, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, and display connectivity. The unit has an internal 40W PSU.

AMD's competitive technology to Intel Thunderbolt, called "Lightning Bolt" (codename, marketing name may differ), surfaced at CES, where AMD was showing off its upcoming "Trinity" accelerated processing units. The technology was dissected by Anandtech, revealing exactly how AMD plans to achieve its goal of providing a much lower-cost alternative to Thunderbolt, over a similar-looking interface. While Thunderbolt is essentially PCI-Express x4 over DisplayPort, Lightning Bolt is the much more mature USB 3.0 SuperSpeed over DisplayPort. It is a single cable that combines a USB 3.0 with DisplayPort (display), and power (sourced directly from the PSU).

The part that makes it affordable is that AMD has already mastered GPU technologies that allow several displays connected to its GPUs using DisplayPort daisy-chaining; while USB 3.0 controllers are getting cheaper by the quarter. Connections of DisplayPort, USB 3.0 and power converge at a Lightning Bolt multiplex, from which the actual ports emerge. Lightning Bolt will stick to established mini-DisplayPort specifications.

German tech website TweakPC did a before-after comparison of applying Microsoft's recently-released KB2645594 + KB2646060 Windows updates, which intend to improve performance of systems running AMD FX processors, by improving the way in which the OS deals with Bulldozer cores, using a top-of-the-line FX-8150 processor. The reviewer put FX-8150 through synthetic tests such as AIDA64 (CPU benchmarks, FPU benchmarks), Cinebench 11.5, MaxxPi (multi-threaded PI calculations), WPrime, Twofish AES, 3DMark (Vantage and 11), ComputeMark; and some real-world tests such as WinRAR, Resident Evil 5, and Battleforge. Barring Resident Evil 5, where the patched FX-8150 produced 4% higher performance and WinRAR, where it produced 3% higher performance, there were no significant performance gains noticed. The review can be accessed at the source.

This week the desktop space has officially entered the 28 nm GPU era thanks to the retail release of the Radeon HD 7970. It's a significant milestone for the discrete graphics market and for AMD, but it's only the beginning as the Sunnyvale-based company is currently preparing the arrival of the Radeon HD 7950 and is planning the introduction of the first 28 nm mobile chips.

While the HD 7950 will debut this quarter, the 28 nm GPUs for notebooks will have to wait a little longer, until Q2. The upcoming mobile parts are of course based on the GCN architecture and will bring DirectX 11.1 support, as well as power, image quality and display output enhancements.

The 28 nm mobile cards will (most) likely be added to the recently-introduced Radeon HD 7000M family which also includes multiple 40 nm-based cards (7600M, 7500M, 7400M, 7300M). Look for 28 nm models to be branded Radeon HD 7700M and higher.

PowerColor is designing a non-reference Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, complete with its own PCB and cooler designs. For the cooler, PowerColor is designing an updated version of its Vortex II cooler featured on some of its older high-end graphics cards based on Radeon HD 6900 series GPUs. The cooler design is your typical aluminum fin-stack heatsink to which heat is fed by four 8 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes. Ventilation is handled by two 80 mm fans, the frames of these fans are threaded and can be twisted to adjust the distance between the fan and the heatsink, adjusting its air-flow.

PowerColor also has a custom-design PCB to go with it, only the prototype pictured has no Tahiti GPU sitting on it, but PowerColor at least has a board design of its own at hand. The PCB draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a CHIL-made controller handles voltage regulation. The VRM consists of a 9+1 phase design with a few other miscellaneous power domains. Those chokes appear to be slightly more cost-effective compared to the CPL-made ones featured on AMD's reference PCB. IR directFETs are replaced by cost-effective yet durable DrMOS chips.