We've already been through the specifications of HD 7970 "Tahiti" in some detail that matters to those who can draw a performance hunch looking at them. This latest slide shows you the feature-set this GPU comes with. To begin with, there are three main categories of feature updates: Graphics CoreNext, AMD Eyefinity 2.0, and AMD APP Acceleration. AMD claims CoreNext to be a "revolutionary" new architecture that changes the way the GPU crunches numbers.

For the past five generations (since Radeon HD 2000), AMD GPUs have used the VLIW (very-long instruction word) core arrangement. Even the latest VLIW4 introduced by Radeon HD 6900 series, was an evolution, than a revolution of that. CoreNext replaces VLIW stream processors with super-scalar Graphics Compute cores. This should translate to higher performance per mm² die-area, resulting in smaller GPUs, giving AMD room for greater cost-cutting if the competition from NVIDIA for this generation takes effect. The GPU itself is built on TSMC's new 28 nm silicon fabrication process. Next up, AMD confirmed support for PCI-Express 3.0 interface, that nearly doubles system bus bandwidth over the previous generation.

First pictures of AMD's mainstream card, HD 7770, have now been leaked online. This card is the first major upgrade to the HD 5770 in two years, since the HD 6770 was just a rebrand. It features the Cape Verde GPU, which replaces the Juniper GPU used in the HD 5770/HD 6770. The card looks somewhat different, with a large fan sitting on top of the GPU, blowing directly onto it and the card's length is the same as the HD 5770, at around 8.25 inches.

Since we reported on the AMD Bulldozer hotfix, The Tech Report reports in an updated post, that the Bulldozer threading hotfix said to improve performance of the processor, has been pulled:

We've spoken with an industry source familiar with this situation, and it appears the release of this hotfix was either inadvertent, premature, or both. There is indeed a Bulldozer threading patch for Windows in the works, but it should come in two parts, not just one. The patch that was briefly released is only one portion of the total solution, and it may very well reduce performance if used on its own. We're hearing the full Windows update for Bulldozer performance optimization is scheduled for release in Q1 of 2012. For now, Bulldozer owners, the best thing to do is to sit tight and wait.

It will be very interesting indeed to see how this much maligned processor benchmarks after the fully developed patch is released. It's true, actually attempting to download the hotfix and agreeing to the licence terms, at the moment, one is lead to a page that shows it as unavailable.

Among the bits and pieces (read: slides) of AMD's press presentation that we're getting, a slide that's definitely missing is performance against competitive or previous generation graphics cards across a range of applications/games. Instead, there's a slide detailing tessellation performance improvements of the Radeon HD 7970 over the previous-generation HD 6970. On average, AMD is looking at about 1.5x (50%) improvements in the tests that it run. One has to also take in to account that the HD 7970 is a faster GPU overall, compared to HD 6970, and of course, that these are AMD's figures.

AMD announced today that Dr. Lisa Su, 42, has agreed to join the company as senior vice president and general manager, Global Business Units. She will report to president and chief executive officer Rory Read. Dr. Su, who was most recently senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Multimedia at Freescale Semiconductor Inc., will oversee AMD's business units focused on the Client, Commercial, Graphics, Professional Graphics, and Game Console markets.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 launch is just around the corner. Ahead of its launch, AMD conducted its usual press briefing. DonanimHaber has access to some of the slides shown in that meeting. Earlier this day, we brought you perhaps the most important of them all, specifications. Let's take a look at the reference board design itself. AMD is sticking to the black+red colour scheme, and has come up with a swanky new cooling assembly design. The design, unlike those of higher-end Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards, is surprisingly curvy and features dashes of red plastic making up its contours, surrounded by tougher black ABS.

A welcome change here from the previous generations, is that the card is truly single-slot capable, when say, a single-slot full-coverage water block is used. High-end cards from previous generation HD 5000 and HD 6000 have a dual DVI connector cluster that extends into two expansion slots, which many enthusiasts found to be annoying, especially when setting up benches with four single-GPU graphics cards in scenarios where PCI-Express slot spacing isn't kind. Moving on to display connectivity, the card has one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors, all arranged in the confines of a single expansion slot. The space of the second slot is dedicated to a hot-air exhaust of the cooling assembly. All board partners are required to ship HDMI-to-DVI dongles, and active mini-DP dongles.

If slide leaked on Orb-Hardware is to be believed we GPU consumers are in for a pretty big treat in the next month or so. The slide shown below states that the AMD 7970 will have a default core clock speed of 925MHz and a whopping 3 GB of GDDR5 memory.

It also sports a 3.5 TFLOPs precision floating point. Which would put it well beyond the NVIDIA flagship single GPU solution. The slide states the a ROP count of 32, against an earlier speculated count of 48. This could be because AMD may have delinked ROP clusters from memory bus. The cooler itself is under the trademark AMD black shroud so there is no way to see if it uses the rumored "vapor chamber" as seen in after market solutions.

Looking past all the beastly prowess of this slide one cannot help but think about power draw. The "leaked" slide states the 7970 will have a peak power draw of 300 W and an idle draw of 3 W. We will have to wait for review to see if any of these amazing stats are true.

In a surprising move, AMD pulled the launch date of Radeon HD 7970, a high-performance single-GPU graphics card based on the 28 nm Tahiti silicon, up to December 22, 2011; from its earlier launch date of January 09, 2012. The January date was a lot more than speculation, as older presentation slides from AMD to distributors and retailers talked specifically about it. The move to pull December 22 (next Thursday) spices things up in the run up for CES. First, it gives AIB partners full freedom to show off their custom-design graphics cards at the event, along with full details about GPU specifications and clock speeds.

According to a VR-Zone report, Radeon HD 7970 will launch on December 22, 2011, this will be the day you will be able to read reviews of the card (at least the AMD reference design board), online. It will be a limited launch (read: paper-launch), but one can expect "full" retail availability of the card by January 09. Another interesting bit of information is concerning the Radeon HD 7950. This card will be available in non-reference board designs from day one, it will however launch on January 09.

Today Windows updater may have brought "Bulldozer" users a little surprise. A hotfix that increases the AMD flagship processors performance. As this "hotfix" is bleeding edge news any benchmarks have yet to be seen but this confirms Windows 7 was in fact hampering "Bulldozer" from performing at 100% in all prior benches. What percentage it was previously performing at has yet to be determined. Here is a small snippet from the Hotfix release notes.

This article introduces an update that optimizes the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs that are used by Windows 7-based or Windows Server 2008 R2-based computers. Currently, the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs is slower than expected. This behavior occurs because the threading logic in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 is not optimized to use the Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) scheduling feature. This feature was introduced in the Bulldozer family of AMD CPUs.

You can download the Hotfix here.

December thru January looks to be a busy time for AMD. Along with a few new graphics products, AMD will launch new CPUs and APUs. The company has chosen December 26 to launch its A8-3870K and A6-3670K Black Edition "Llano" accelerated processing units (APUs) in the FM1 package, which feature unlocked base clock multipliers for the processor component, making overclocking a breeze. In two of its presentation slides to distributors, it unveiled the swanky new box art of these unlocked APUs.

These chips pack four x86-64 cores based on the "Stars" K10.5 architecture with 1 MB dedicated L2 cache per core, dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz integrated memory controller, PCI-Express 2.0 root complex, and a "discrete-class" graphics processor that packs 400 VLIW5 stream processors, DirectX 11 support, and the ability to pair with similarly specc'd discrete GPUs. The A8-3870K Black Edition features x86 core clock speed of 3.00 GHz, and Radeon HD 6550D graphics that features all 400 of those stream processors, with 600 MHz GPU clock speed. The A6-3670K Black Edition, on the other hand, has its x86 component clocked at 2.70 GHz, it features Radeon HD 6530D graphics that has 320 out of the 400 stream processors enabled, and a GPU clock of 433 MHz.

AMD CEO Rory Read, speaking at the IT Supply Chain conference organized by Raymond James this Tuesday, said that his company had begun shipping 28 nm GPUs for revenue (meaning, in volumes big enough to fetch revenue). With it, AMD fulfilled its promise to be the first to the market with GPUs built on the 28 nm silicon fab process. AMD's foundry partner for these chips is TSMC. "We are ramping 28nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now. We are very excited about the products," said Read.

At the upcoming CES event, AMD will formally unveil a range of products that will use its 28 nm GPUs. CES will give AMD a good opportunity to bag design wins with large volume manufacturers of notebooks and PCs. What this means for the enthusiast community is that whenever AMD does launch its Radeon HD 7900 series, it won't be a "paper-launch".

AMD launched its AMD FX processor family with two eight-core parts (FX-8150, FX-8120), a six-core part (FX-6100), and a quad-core one (FX-4100), apparently a newer, slightly faster six-core FX processor is just around the corner, the FX-6200. Since all AMD FX processors are unlocked out of the box, the FX-6200 is essentially a speed-bump. Out of the box, it is clocked at 3.80 GHz, with 4.10 GHz maximum TurboCore speed. It features six cores, 6 MB total L2 cache, and 8 MB total L3 cache. Its TDP is rated at 125W. In a presentation to retailers sourced by DonanimHaber, AMD pitched the FX-6200 to have about 10% higher performance at Mainconcept HD to Flash conversion, than the FX-6100 (3.30 GHz nominal, 3.90 GHz max. turbo).

Sapphire is working on two new entry-level motherboards for AMD FM1 and Intel LGA1155 platforms. The FM1 board, called the Pure White A55, is a budget micro-ATX board based on the AMD A55 FCH; while the LGA1155 board is the Pure Platinum H61P, an ATX board based on the Intel H61 chipset. The Pure White A55 uses a simple 5+1 phase VRM to power the AMD A-Series APU or Athlon II FM1 CPU. The FM1 socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory. The "Memory Free" feature stabilizes memory clock speeds, voltages, and timings if wrong settings make the system fail POST, at the push of a button.

Expansion slots of the Pure White A55 include one PCI-Express 2.0 x16, two PCIe 2.0 x1, and a legacy PCI. All six SATA 3 Gb/s ports of the A55 FCH are assigned as internal ports. Display outputs include HDMI, DVI, and D-Sub. Other connectivity features include 6-channel HD audio, gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. The board uses redundant BIOS on separate ROM chips, that protect it against bad BIOS updates. The Pure Platinum H61P uses a 6 phase VRM to power the LGA1155 processor. The socket is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16 GB of dual-channel DDR3 memory.

AMD's chief marketing officer (CMO) Nigel Dessau, will be leaving the company. AMD's new CEO Rory P. Read has been making some aggressive changes to the company in a bid to turn it into a lean, well-oiled, profit-making business that it should be. Recently, he laid off a big chunk of AMD's staff, most reported to be from the marketing department. This only goes on to reinforce the theory that Nigel Dessau was axed, and not that he will quit. Nigel Dessau joined the company in 2008. He has served as CMO at StorageTek, Sun Microsystems and IBM, previously. Dessau said in his Twitter page that he will leave AMD in January, but will see the company through at CES, when new GPU products will be unveiled.

AMD today released the final installment of its monthly Catalyst Software Suite updates for this year, Catalyst 11.12 WHQL. The software provides device drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon GPUs, AMD Chipset-integrated graphics, AMD Fusion APU-integrated graphics, AMD HDMI audio, and related software such as AMD Catalyst Control Center for discrete Radeon GPUs, and Vision Control Center for integrated ones; and HydraVision.

Key Features:

• AMD OpenGL 4.2 production support
  o AMD Catalyst 11.12 delivers official support for the OpenGL 4.2 specification
• AMD Eyefinity technology enhancements
  o Enables support for AMD HD3D technology when using a 3x1 Landscape Eyefinity display group, on supported DisplayPort 3D monitors.
• AMD Vision Engine Control Center enhancements for Dual Graphics
  o Improvements have been implemented to better facilitate the enabling and control of the Dual Graphics within the Vision Engine Control Center

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.12 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

For more information about resolved issues, refer to the Release Notes.

Reliable sources among AMD add-in board partners told DonanimHaber that the upcoming AMD Radeon HD 7900 series will introduce a new feature that other SKUs based on Southern Islands GPUs could also include. It's called Eyefinity 3D, and as the name might suggest, it's the next major update to Eyefinity, a technology that lets you span a single display head across up to six physical displays, and gives you the ability to use your available physical displays to accommodate multiple such display heads.

Eyefinity 3D adds support for 3D-optimized (120 Hz) displays, and lets you create large stereoscopic 3D display heads using a number of physical 3D displays. The technology behind this might not be as simple as it sounds, because the driver has to take into account the viewing angles of the displays in perspective to the user (as entered by the user), and calibrate the 3D image output. The same sources also hinted about the pricing of Radeon HD 7970.

Ladies and Gentlemen with graphics card upgrade plans, circle the date January 09, 2012, for this is going to be the day AMD will launch its next generation high-performance graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7900 series, according to reliable market sources DonanimHaber spoke with. On the 9th, AMD is expected to unveil at least two new SKUs in the HD 7900 series, most likely, HD 7970 and HD 7950. These will be based on the new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon that will use completely redesigned number-crunching machinery, and a very wide memory bus.

If the word on the optical fibers is true, we are less than a month away from the launch of AMD's next high-end graphics card family based on its next high-performance GPU, codenamed "Tahiti". According to 3DCenter, AMD will launch new graphics card models based on this GPU around January 10, 2012. It is expected that we'll learn a lot more about these GPUs, maybe even come across AIB-branded graphics cards, at the upcoming CES event.

3DCenter compiled specifications of "Tahiti", based on bits and pieces of information from various sources. The specs can be listed out as:

• 4.50 billion transistors, die-area of 380 mm², built on TSMC 28 nm process
• Advanced GCN 1D architecture
• 2048 1D processing cores
• 128 TMUs, 48 ROPs
• 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, memory clock slightly below 1 GHz, target bandwidth of 240~264 GB/s

In Gandhi's words, salt is as free as the air.

Today may be a Fringe-less Friday but worry not, there are plenty of thing to do like contemplating the two recently-leaked images of an AMD Tahiti-powered graphics card. Tahiti is a 'next-gen' GPU built on TSMC's 28 nm process that's supposed to be at the heart of the Radeon HD 7900 series models (the HD 7950, HD 7970, and then probably the dual-GPU HD 7990).

The card seen below comes with one Tahiti chip protected by a heatspreader/shield (only the die is exposed) and has a red PCB, a 5+1-phase PWM, two BIOSes, two PCIe power plugs, CrossFire connectors enabling quad-GPU configurations, and 12 memory chips which support previous reports of a 384-bit memory interface.

The Radeon HD 7900 series cards are rumored to debut in January at CES 2012 (January 10-13) so we still have one month of leaks to look forward to. Oh, and the winter holidays.

A Beyond3D forum member posted a mysterious picture of two graphics cards that could very well be engineering samples of AMD's true next-generation Radeon HD 7900 "Tahiti" graphics cards. The final products most probably won't look like these, with a bare red PCB, but it does look like the reference cooler design is ready. A more important feature in that picture is the spotting of traces for at least 11 memory chips, the 12th one (not highlighted) is apparently near the PCIe slot interface. The presence of 12 memory chips gives rumors of Tahiti featuring a 384-bit wide memory interface a shot in the arm. This will be the first AMD GPU in over 5 years to feature a memory bus wider than 256-bit. The R600 Radeon HD 2900 GPU featured a 512-bit GDDR4-capable memory interface.

Korean company Zalman, known more for its innovative PC air cooling solutions, PSUs, and cases, entered the graphics card business. The company is now an AMD Radeon add-in board (AIB) partner, and started its lineup off with some upper-mainstream models. It makes perfect sense for Zalman to enter this business, as it holds some expertise with high-end graphics card cooling solutions. Zalman can source PCBs from any of the major foundries such as PC Partner, Hightech Information Systems, or TUL, and assemble its coolers on top of them. Zalman's first three graphics cards are based on Radeon HD 6870, HD 6850, and HD 6770, with AMD reference clock speeds. What markets Zalman will target its new graphics card lineup with, is not known.

In addition to introducing the 'new' Radeon HD 7000M mobile GPUs, AMD has this week updated its A-Series family of APUs (accelerated processing units) by adding to it no less than seven models specifically targeting the mobile segment. All seven chips are manufactured using 32nm process technology and should keep laptops makers (relatively) happy until Trinity lands in the first half of 2012.

Over the week, AMD launched three of the first notebook GPUs in the Radeon HD 7000 series in a bid to stay competitive in the notebook GPU market, even if it means re-branding already launched GPUs like NVIDIA did, with its recent GeForce 600M series launch. The newly [re]launched mGPUs include Radeon HD 7400M, HD 7500M, and HD 7600M. The three are based on current-generation Caicos and Turks GPUs.

The HD 7400M is based on the "Caicos" silicon, featuring 160 stream processors, 8 TMUs, 4 ROPs, and a 64-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The HD 7500M and HD 7600M are based on the "Turks" silicon, the HD 7500M features 480 stream processors, 24 TMUs, 8 ROPs, and 64-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface (more economical with lower number of memory chips, while offering the same performance as 128-bit DDR3); while the HD 7600M features all the features of the HD 7500M, including the full 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that AMD Fusion '12 will be held June 11-14, 2012 in Bellevue, Washington. The company's annual developer summit will return to the Meydenbauer Center and the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue.

This event will build on the success of AMD Fusion '11, where more than 700 leaders from industry, academia, and government converged on the forefront of heterogeneous computing. The summit offers an engaging opportunity to learn more about next-generation software development and AMD Fusion System Architecture (FSA), Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) technology, central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) processor technologies, and programming methods using industry-standard application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenCL, OpenGL, Microsoft DirectCompute and C++ AMP.

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of NAND flash storage solutions, today announces a new line of 1333 MHz, quad rank registered DDR3 RDIMM modules for servers. Today's new motherboards that support the new 16 core processors, now require a new type of RDIMMs, quad-channel DDR3. On the heels of their single and dual rank RDIMMs, Super Talent is pleased to announce a new Quad-Rank Module for those who require even more DRAM capacity.

At 8 GB per module, today's servers can now support a maximum of 128 GB of RAM. These modules have passed vigorous testing using the new AMD Interlagos compatible motherboards and even support fully loaded configurations at speeds up to 1066 MHz. If you're deploying a new server and have been looking for RDIMMs to deliver maximum performance and capacity, you owe it to yourself to call SuperTalent. Products available and shipping now. Part Number: W13RC8G8x - 8GB RDIMM Module.