AMD is on course to releasing its latest "Southern Islands" GPU family, and a fleet of desktop graphics card SKUs based on it, which will be led by a new high-performance GPU, codenamed "Tahiti", which will make up Radeon HD 7900 series; followed by performance GPU "Pitcairn", on which HD 7800 series will be based; "Thames" and "Lombok" making up the rest of the lineup. According to a report by DonanimHaber, HD 7970 (working name) is expected to be competitive with (or outperform) GeForce GTX 580, and priced at US $499. The HD 7950 will be competitive with (again, or outperform) GeForce GTX 570, being priced at US $399.

Things get interesting with Pitcairn, which is the successor of "Barts". This performance GPU is designed for sweet-spot SKUs, such as HD 7870 and HD 7850, which will be competitive with GeForce GTX 560 Ti / GTX 560, and priced at US $299 and $199, respectively. The Radeon HD 7670 will be particularly expensive, priced at US $179, followed by HD 7650 at $119. Further, it was reported that HD 7970 and HD 7950 will have a standard memory size of 3 GB.

PC major HP made a slight slip, disclosing AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7000M series GPUs as options available for some of its notebooks. These are the first public disclosures of a 28 nm GPU. The new options that had been made available were Radeon HD 7670M, and Radeon HD 7690M, both based on the "Thames-XT" GPU. The Thames-XT GPU is built on the 28 nm process, and features current-generation VLIW4 stream processors, a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, and is DirectX 11 compliant. AMD unveiled this GPU at a press event in London on the 5th.

Lenovo announced today the ThinkPad X130e laptop, specially ruggedized for education and with the features needed to help students in grades K-12 and their schools get the most out of their PC technology. Equipped with the advanced technology expected for an educational laptop, the ThinkPad X130e comes with choices of the latest Intel or AMD processors and fast, integrated graphics as well as wireless connectivity and multimedia tools for today's digital learning. Designed to be handled by kids, the ThinkPad X130e has a reinforced and extra durable top cover, keyboard and hinges. Schools will also like its performance, reliability and customizable options including asset tags, BIOS modifications, custom imaging and a broad selection of custom colors.

Later this month, AMD will finally launch its much overdue unlocked A8 and A6 series APUs in the FM1 package, that are geared for overclocking. The A8-3870K is clocked at 3.00 GHz, and the A6-3670K at 2.60 GHz. The two are quad-core APUs, and differ by the core clock speeds and integrated GPUs. While the A8-3870K packs Radeon HD 6550D graphics with 400 stream processors, the A6-3670K has Radeon HD 6530D graphics with 320 stream processors. The two were listed for pre-order on ShopBLT, with the A8-3870K priced at US $143.77, and the A6-3670K at $121.50. It is expected that prices of A8-3850 and A6-3650 will drop after the launch of these two chips.

AMD is reportedly working on a new Radeon HD 6900 series single-GPU graphics card based on the "Cayman" silicon, the Radeon HD 6930. This SKU will be designed to make things very competitive for the non-Ti GeForce GTX 560 from NVIDIA. In its most recent salvo, NVIDIA launched a limited edition GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 CUDA cores, targeting select markets in the winter shopping season. Tests showed it to be very competitive with HD 6950 and HD 6970, and is priced accordingly, at $289. AMD's new SKU will be designed to heat things up in the sub-$200 market where GTX 560 non-Ti and HD 6870 are trading blows.

Carved out of the 40 nm "Cayman" silicon, the GPU in its HD 6930 configuration will carry the codename "Cayman-CE". It will feature 1280 advanced VLIW4 stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface that will hold 1 GB of memory. The core will be clocked at 750 MHz, and the memory at 1200 MHz (4.80 GHz effective). Most AIBs will reuse their cost-effective HD 6950 1 GB board designs with the new SKUs. The new Radeon HD 6930 is expected to be priced around $180.

AMD's new flagship Bulldozer "FX" series of processors have turned out to be mediocre performers in almost every review and benchmark going, sometimes even getting bested by the existing Phenom II and certainly no match for their Intel competition. To add to this tale of fail, it now turns out that AMD didn't even know how many transistors they have! Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech received an email from AMD's PR department and this is the revelation he had to share with us:

This is a bit unusual. I got an email from AMD PR this week asking me to correct the Bulldozer transistor count in our Sandy Bridge E review. The incorrect number, provided to me (and other reviewers) by AMD PR around 3 months ago was 2 billion transistors. The actual transistor count for Bulldozer is apparently 1.2 billion transistors. I don't have an explanation as to why the original number was wrong, just that the new number has been triple checked by my contact and is indeed right. The total die area for a 4-module/8-core Bulldozer remains correct at 315 mm².

AMD's new Bulldozer "FX" series of processors may be very lacklustre performers in reviewer's benchmarks and have garnered considerable scorn in enthusiast circles, but they're a very good performer for AMD's bottom line. Incredibly, they are selling out as soon as shops get them in stock - and they are not even priced very competitively against Intel's offerings, so perhaps the "It's an 8 core CPU!!" marketing is working well on the uninformed "enthusiast" after all? Mind you, what enthusiast, however uninformed, wouldn't know exactly how these products perform? Every tech website and computer magazine has covered these chips by now. The mind boggles.

AMD published the third performance driver based on Catalyst 11.11, the Catalyst 11.11c. The driver addresses some glaring issues ahead of the upcoming Catalyst WHQL monthly update. The new performance driver addresses the following issue:

Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling for the AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Apart from the applied changes, the new Catalyst 11.11c includes all the changes brought about by previous Catalyst 11.11 performance drivers.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11c Performance Driver for Windows 7 and Vista | Windows XP

It looks like the Bulldozer disaster might have been too much of a setback for AMD to recover from. After 30 years of competing with Intel in the x86 processor market, AMD is about to give up, even with the 2009 1.25bn antitrust settlement they extracted from them. Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman said, "We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore." He was vague on the exact strategy that AMD intends to pursue from now on, though. However, the company is widely expected to make a concerted effort to break into the smartphones and tablets market. The big problem with this strategy unfortunately, is that this arena is currently dominated by many other competitors. On top of that, their arch enemy Intel is also trying to muscle in on this space, hence AMD could find themselves back at square one, or likely even further back. AMD's graphics cards are doing well at the moment though and are quite competitive, so it looks like their expensive purchase of ATI back in 2006, might yet save the company from extinction. If they become primarily a graphics card company, they will inevitably end up a lot smaller than they are now though and that's a lot of lost jobs and personal hardship, along with a monopoly x86 market remaining and all of its negative effects on the market.

According to a NordicHardware report, December 5 is pin-pointed as the day AMD will unveil its some of its new Radeon HD 7000 graphics processors. It is indicated that products launched on that day will be based on GPUs built on the 28 nanometer fabrication process. The new products will be unveiled in London. It's likely that these are mobile parts based on the "Thames" and "Seymour" silicons. An alternate theory is that AMD could unveil some of its next-generation GPUs based on the GCN architecture, AMD's biggest leap in GPU architecture since Radeon HD 2000 series.

In August, we got a first glimpse of AMD Radeon-branded DDR3 memory modules sold at select stores in Japan. At the time, AMD denied plans of directly selling AMD-branded memory to customers, and that it was determining if the sale of AMD Radeon-branded memory through channel partners is a viable opportunity. Today there is concrete evidence that AMD wants to go directly to customers with their DDR3 memory products, and has partnered with two well known companies in its effort.

Presenting a more polished AMD memory module lineup. The first ones (pictured in the link above) looked not much more than bare, generic-looking DDR3 modules with Radeon logo stickers. The new ones look better designed for customers, since good product design pays heavily in the retail channel. The new modules use black colored PCBs, metal heatspreaders, and red colored full-length stickers. A confirmation that these products are headed to the retail channel is the box. OEMs don't buy memory modules in boxes, they buy them in trays. AMD has a nice-looking product box design with a carbon-fiber pattern and appropriate branding.

On our front page, we placed a poll in mid-September, ahead of AMD FX Processor family launch (based on the "Bulldozer" architecture). Based on the most plausible specifications and the hype surrounding the products at the time, we had a hunch that neither Bulldozer nor Sandy Bridge-E will meet our readers' expectations. AMD FX Processor family turned out to be a Duke Nukem Forever, clogged in the pipeline for too long (since 2007, as a matter of fact), when it came out, it made a mockery of itself. It's barely faster than its previous generation.

Sandy Bridge-E promised to be a pin-up processor platform that's eons faster than its predecessor, its specs-sheets warranted its hype. As it turns out, although they're the fastest processors, they aren't much faster than previous-generation Westmere six-core chips at multi-threaded applications, and aren't much faster than Sandy Bridge LGA1155 Core i7 processors at gaming and serial loads. We set out to find out which would turn out to be a bigger "fail" (failure, in internet jargon). To stuff the poll up with more options, we experimented with the idea of placing a seemingly-unbeatable poll option "Our Politicians", just to see if either of the two could fail so hard, that politicians end up better. The myth that politicians always win at a failing contest is busted, at least in this case.

AMD rolled out its second Catalyst performance driver update in a week, with the Catalyst 11.11b. It follows Catalyst 11.11a, which was released earlier this week. A performance driver update is what AMD used to call "Hotfixes", they are updates for recently-released WHQL-signed drivers, featuring some performance improvements fresh from the Catalyst developer team. In includes all the changes 11.11a brings to the table, plus the ones listed below:
Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling for AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
  o AMD Radeon HD 5000 CrossFire support will be supported soon in an updated driver

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

• New in Catalyst 11.11b: Delivers AMD CrossFire performance scaling

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11b Performance Driver for Windows 7 and Vista | Windows XP

Finally, next generation gaming consoles are around the corner. It will have an uplifting effect on the entire gaming industry as it will raise the bar for visual and technical detail in games. Many of today's games are designed keeping consoles in mind, and so their PC platform versions don't look much more than what has come to be known as "console-ports". There are a few exceptions to this, but it would be refreshing to see most game developers move on to creating games that take advantage of today's insanely powerful PC platform, because the console platform will have caught up technologically.

Rumors have it, that Microsoft will be developing not one, but two product lines that succeed the Xbox 360, and we're not talking about product variants here, but two distinct lines. The first of the two will be an entry-level console designed more like a set-top box, designed around the Kinect controller (perhaps something to compete against Nintendo Wii U). The second product line will be the one that will be supercharged with the latest technologies that will raise the bar in graphics. It will compete with whatever succeeds the Playstation 3. There is talk that it will pack a 6 core processor, an AMD-made GPU, and 2 GB of fast DDR3 memory. This console could be unveiled to the world (although not launched), at the CES event held in January. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing TSMC some time to refine its 28 nm bulk process.

It looks like developer DICE has been doing a lot of listening to its customers, as the large number of complaints over in-game glitches has produced an almighty patch, fixing just about everything, including the kitchen sink, while making lots of little tweaks to improve gameplay and the user interface. On top of that, the patch is PC only for now as the console versions are taking "a bit longer due to [the] console certification process".

Bugfixes include such goodies as a "Black Screen" fix for an issue occurring on some PC Configurations; spawn protection improvements; increasing the damage from the 44 Magnum slightly; sharing your profile and stats with new Battlelog functionality; profile integration with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and lots more. The full list appears below.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced that it has set a new world record with a memory frequency of 1733.8MHz (DDR3-3467) using Corsair Dominator GT CMGTX6 extreme-performance DDR3 memory.

World champion overclocker and Corsair employee Jake "Planet" Crimmins set the new record at Corsair's laboratory with a custom-designed, liquid nitrogen cooled PC based on an AMD FX-8150 processor and equipped with 1GB of Dominator GT extreme-performance DDR3 memory. The system was powered by a Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200 fully modular power supply.

Around the 9th of December, AMD will announce its first Radeon HD 7000M series graphics processors, beginning with mobile parts (for notebooks). There will be at least 16 models announced, all based on two silicons: "Thames" and "Seymour", and being carved out of toggling various components within those GPUs. The models AMD will be launching will span across the Radeon HD 7400M series, 7500M series, and 7600M series. Thames and Seymour are brand new chips built on the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process, which will allow AMD more TDP headroom, which it can use to step up clock speeds.

While we don't have key details such as stream processor, ROP, and TMU counts, a table based on data compiled by CompuBase.de lists out GPU and memory clock speeds, memory interface widths, and memory type. The table also mentions some higher-end GPU models named "Chelsea", "Heathrow", and "Wimbeldon". By now you know that all these codenames are after names of places in the UK. That's one way you can identify Radeon HD 7000M mobile GPUs from the "Southern Islands" Radeon HD 7000 desktop discrete GPU family (named after islands in the southern hemisphere).

The world of corporate disputes is a funny one. S3 Graphics filed a compliant against Apple for infringing four of its patents related to its graphics IP. Later this year, ITC announced a verdict ruling in favor of S3 Graphics around the same time S3 Graphics was being purchased by HTC. In a spectacular turn of events, on November 21, ITC took a U-turn by overruling the favorable verdict and dismissing S3 Graphics' case.

Commentators note that AMD's intervention into the case as a non-party may have played a key role, AMD claimed the patents in question to be its own, later Apple sought dismissal of the case based on the grounds of AMD's claims. ITC denied AMD and Apple requests to publicly disclose the details of the patents in question, so the the public would't find out what patent claims were used against S3 Graphics. AMD is currently the principal supplier of GPUs for Apple's Mac products, though there are now rumors that with the next generation of Macs, Apple could change its GPU supplier to AMD's rival NVIDIA.

AMD released its latest "performance driver" for Radeon graphics cards, the Catalyst 11.11a. With this release, AMD is using the term "performance driver" to refer to performance-enhancing Hotfix updates it launches between its scheduled monthly WHQL-signed updates. Catalyst 11.11a fixes some outstanding game-related bugs and improves performance and resolves driver-related bugs for a variety of recently-released titles such as Batman: Arkham City, Rage, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Battlefield 3. The rest of the driver is based on Catalyst 11.11.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11a Performance Driver for Windows 7 or Vista | Windows XP

A list of changes follows.

As early as in September, we heard reports of AMD toying with Rambus XDR2 memory on its next generation of high-performance GPUs. Apart from our own community's response, that news met with a wall of skepticism as it was deficient in plausibility. New reports from Chinese websites have raised the topic again with fresh rumors that AMD will attempt to implement XDR2 on some of its next-generation ultra-high end products after all. XDR2, according to Rambus, can transport twice the amount of data per clock as GDDR5.

Apparently AMD and Rambus have had much more cordial relations with each other, than other companies the latter engaged in patent disputes with. In 2006, AMD settled outstanding disputes with Rambus by willing to pay licensing costs for certain technologies claimed by Rambus, turning a leaf in the relations between the two. What Chinese sources are suggesting now, is that AMD will design its high-end GPU (codename: "Tahiti") in a way that will let it support both GDDR5 and XDR2. Certain higher-end SKUs based on Tahiti will use XDR2, while the slightly more cost-effective SKUs will use GDDR5.

"Trinity" is the codename of AMD's next-generation performance accelerated processing unit (APU) family. Based on the new socket FM2 package, these chips will take advantage of AMD's next-generation Piledriver processor core architecture and VLIW4 GPU stream processor architecture. Together, Trinity promises increased general, visual, and parallel compute performance. Some of the slides detailing AMD's own performance estimates were put up by DonanimHaber in their recent video bulletin. We screen-grabbed the performance graphs from the low-resolution video, hence the grainy images.

To begin with, AMD is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current "Llano" APU. It spread its benchmarks across three categories: visual performance (using 3DMark Vantage), general performance (using PCMark Vantage), and parallel compute (GPGPU) performance (calculated CTP SP GFLOPs). With 3DMark Vantage, Trinity A8 (quad-core), A6 (triple-core), and A4 (dual-core) APUs are seeing a roughly 32% improvement over their respective Llano-based counterparts; with general performance, the improvement is a candid 13.8% on average; but with GPGPU performance, the improvement is a massive 56.3% on average. This could be attributed to the VLIW4 architecture. Lastly, there are notable CrossFire dual-graphics performance improvements.

AMD has now released the CrossFireX Catalyst Application Profiles 2 for their latest 11.11 WHQL drivers. The improvements apply to just two games:

New profiles added to this release:

- Saints Row 3: Resolves stuttering seen when playing in CrossFireX mode. Also provides Single GPU and CrossFireX performance improvements when running in lower resolution configurations
- Gothic 4 Arcania: Fall of Setarrif: Improves CrossFire performance

There's nothing yet for hit game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in this release, unfortunately. CAP 2 can be downloaded here.

Want a new graphics card this shopping season? Is news of Radeon HD 7000 series arriving late this year or early next year holding you back from purchasing current-generation? Don't let it, go grab that graphics card you had your eyes on. Fairly reliable sources point out that a bulk of Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards will be based on rebranded current and previous generation GPUs. This bulk mostly spans across the entry-thru-mid range of the product lineup. Familiar GPU codenames such as Cedar, Caicos, and Turks, make a comeback with Radeon HD 7300 series, HD 7400 series, HD 7500 series, and HD 7600 series.

Moving up the ladder, the source postulates two possibilities for Radeon HD 7700 series. First, and more plausible, is that the series is based on Juniper (a hop across two previous generations!); the second is that these make use of rechristened GPUs from a slightly higher market position from the previous generation. Perhaps Barts, perhaps even highly crippled Cayman. The only real next-generation GPU is codenamed "Tahiti", but we're hearing that graphics cards based on it are said to not follow the Radeon HD 7000 series nomenclature altogether.

NVIDIA today announced that system builders worldwide are now shipping the fastest PC gaming platforms ever built, thanks in part to NVIDIA SLI technology and the just-released Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors and X79 chipset-based motherboards.

The combination of NVIDIA SLI technology -- which allows for multiple GPUs to run on a single PC -- and new X79-based motherboards allow gamers to customize their PC experience with up to four NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570, the world's fastest DX11 GPUs. Licensed by the world's leading motherboard manufacturers -- including Intel, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI, SLI technology is crucial for playing this year's hottest graphics-intensive games, such as the recently released Battlefield 3 and upcoming Batman: Arkham City with detail, resolution and immersion settings cranked up.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies. Khronos has updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to ensure that implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development. The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are available here.

"The OpenCL working group is listening carefully to feedback from the developer and middleware community to provide significant and timely functionality for heterogeneous computing in this cross vendor open standard," said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. "The OpenCL working group is also broadening its membership and has growing representation from the mobile and embedded industries and is enabling innovative devices such as FPGAs to be driven through OpenCL."