AMD released the latest version of the ATI Catalyst software suite. Version 10.9 WHQL comes rather early for this time of the month, when normally it's out towards the end or last week. ATI Catalyst installs drivers and system software for ATI Radeon graphics processors (HD 2000 series and above), AMD chipset integrated graphics, and other ATI multimedia products. Although Catalyst 10.9 does not mention any notable feature changes, it does offer some game-specific performance improvements across the board, as well as CrossFireX profiles that make the graphics driver take advantage of CrossFireX specific to games. Notable improvements include up to 20% in STALKER: Call of Pripyat Benchmark on Radeon HD 5800 series, and up to 6% on The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, when running Radeon HD 5970 single or CrossFireX. A usual load of bug fixes goes with this version.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.9 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

A complete list of changes follows.

During keynote presentations today at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel Corporation executives outlined several software- and hardware-related efforts as the company intensifies its System-on-a-Chip (SoC) product plans based on the Intel Atom processor family.

Amid predictions of billions of additional Internet-connected devices going online, Renée James, senior vice president and general manager, Intel Software and Services Group, and Doug Davis, vice president and general manager, Embedded and Communications Group, discussed the expansion of these processors into high-growth areas including netbooks, tablets, CE, embedded, and smart phones.

Intel Corporation announced today that a dozen of new netbooks based on its new mobile dual-core Intel Atom processors are available in stores today. The netbooks - available now and through the end of the year from manufacturers including Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba - enable new levels of support for applications like games, as well as Adobe Flash technology for access to a number of Web pages including online hotel booking systems and multimedia sites such as YouTube and Hulu.

"Acer strives to continually improve on our customers' total mobile experience, whether it is increased responsiveness or extended Internet interactivity through longer battery life," said David Lee, associate vice president of Acer's Mobile Computing Business Unit. "We are pleased to select dual-core Intel Atom processors for Acer netbooks, helping to empower netbook users achieve even more - both at work and at leisure."

NEC is preparing a new professional-grade 27-inch LCD monitor called MultiSync Reference 271. The 271 uses a 10-bit P-IPS panel that give 98% Adobe RGB coverage, for a wide color gamut. The panel has a wide viewing angle of 178 degrees. Its frame design enables pivot at swivel adjustments.

The panel has a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (aspect ratio 16:9), with 5 ms response time. Its static contrast ratio is 1000:1, with a maximum brightness of 360 cd/m². It takes input from D-Sub (analog) and DVI-D or dual DVI. Backed by a 3-year warranty, the MultiSync Reference 271 is up for pre-order for under 1800 EUR.

NVIDIA reported revenue of $1.0 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended May 2, 2010, up 2 percent from the prior quarter and up 51 percent from $664.2 million in the same period a year earlier. On a GAAP basis, the company recorded net income of $137.6 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2011. That compares with $131.1 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, in the previous quarter and a net loss of $201.3 million, or $0.37 per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Gross margin increased to 45.6 percent for the first quarter fiscal 2011 from 44.7 percent in the previous quarter and 28.6 percent in the same period a year earlier.

• Revenue grew 2 percent quarter-on-quarter to $1.0 billion
• GAAP net income increased to $137.6 million, or $0.23 per diluted share
• GAAP gross margin improved to 45.6 percent

NVIDIA today announced that a range of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions are certified by Adobe for Adobe Creative Suite 5 software, and truly unleash the real-time video editing and effects processing capabilities of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

This breakthrough version of Adobe Premiere Pro leverages the parallel processing architecture of NVIDIA GPUs and their hundreds of cores to allow film and video professionals to work unconstrained. Users can now create compelling, multi-layer projects with a virtually limitless number of HD or higher resolution video clips, then apply sophisticated visual effects and color correction, while still being able to view the output instantly.

By utilizing NVIDIA Quadro solutions, productivity is enhanced many times over by eliminating the wait for preview renders any time a change is made, and by being able to view projects at full resolution without skipping frames.

The most popular alternative to Internet Explorer, Firefox, may get an overhaul of its feature-set that could make its performance a lot more competitive with that of Google Chrome. Firefox may finally embrace out of process plugins, and a new rendering engine that makes use of Microsoft Direct2D, with which it can offload a big chunk of rendering to the GPU. While this may not speed up page load times for the bandwidth-constrained, it will certainly make the browser more responsive, especially as web-page complexity grows with new technologies such as HTML5.

As of now, the inclusion of GPU-accelerated rendering is only slated to be in the form of an alpha release, which could make it to a stable release around an year's time, and not part of Gecko's next release, version 1.9.3. A stable Firefox based on Gecko 1.9.3 will be released only by October. Developers hope that the next release of Gecko will be able to include GPU-accelerated rendering. The other major feature addition is out-of-process plugins. Not to be confused with multi-process rendering, out-of-process plugins feature runs plugins such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Sun Java, Microsoft Silverlight, etc., in processes separate from the browser's main process. So in case there is an erratic page element, it could be ended without crashing the entire browser. Developers aim to have a stable release with this feature by the end of this quarter on both Windows and Linux, with a Mac release a little later.

NVIDIA Corp., announces NVIDIA Optimus technology, a breakthrough for notebook PCs that chooses the best graphics processor for running a given application and automatically routes the workload to either an NVIDIA discrete GPU or Intel integrated graphics - delivering great performance while also providing great battery life.

"Consumers no longer have to choose whether they want great graphics performance or sustained battery life," said Rene Haas, general manager of notebook products at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA Optimus gives them both - great performance, great battery life and it simply works." Just as a Hybrid car chooses between the gas-powered and electric car engine on-the-fly and uses the most appropriate engine, NVIDIA Optimus technology does the same thing for graphics processors. NVIDIA Optimus Technology instantly directs the workload through the most efficient processor for the job, extending battery life by up to 2 times compared to similarly configured systems equipped with discrete graphics processors (GPUs). When playing 3D games, running videos, or using GPU compute applications the high-performance NVIDIA discrete GPU is used. When using basic applications, like web surfing or email, the integrated graphics processor is used. The result is long lasting battery life without sacrificing great graphics performance.

NVIDIA released a beta version of its GeForce driver suite. Version 195.62 beta provides driver support for GeForce 6 series, 7 series, 8 series, 100 and 200 series GPUs, along with support for the NVIDIA ION chipset. This release also bundles PhysX version 9.09.0814 system software. Important changes include:

• Added GPU-acceleration for smoother online HD videos with the new Adobe Flash 10.1 beta.
• Added support for GeForce GT 240.
• Added support for OpenCL 1.0 (Open Computing Language) for all GeForce 8-series and later GPUs.
• Added support for CUDA Toolkit 3.0 features and performance enhancements.
• Added SLI and multi-GPU support for many top new gaming titles including Borderlands, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, FIFA Soccer 10, and more.

Be cautioned, these are beta drivers, the use of which is not covered by product warranties.

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 196.62 BETA

AMD published its near-monthly installment of the ATI Catalyst Software Suite, which provides essential drivers for the company's ATI Radeon graphics processors, AMD 7-series chipset IGPs, ATI multimedia products, and the AMD FireStream GPGPU processors. Version 9.11 announced today, comes with the same hardware support base as the older version, includes two new features, and carries the usual application-specific fixes.

New features include GPU Acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta, and High Quality downscaling for video transcoding MSE. The release of ATI Catalyst, according to AMD, supports the new Hardware Acceleration features of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta for video encoded in the H.264 format. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Beta introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth video playback, reduce system resource utilization, and preserve battery life. Hardware acceleration is supported on all existing Radeon HD 5000 and HD 4000 series graphics processors. The release of ATI Catalyst includes an enhancement for the ATI Video converter for users transcoding high quality interlaced content (1920x1080i @60i videos) down to small resolution progressive content (320x240 @30p - iPod videos as an example), by maintaining high visual quality when down-scaling by a significant amount and converting interlaced video content to progressive. For a list of minor issues fixed in the release, refer to the Release Notes document.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 9.11 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows 7/Vista 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit

Professional videographers face continuous pressure to deliver high quality work under tight deadlines. To ease that burden and enable greater levels of creativity, NVIDIA today announced the availability of GPU-accelerated plug-in solutions for Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) users, optimized to run on a wide range of NVIDIA Quadro graphics solutions.

NVIDIA is offering exclusive discounts of up to 50 percent on plug-ins from Elemental Technologies, Boris FX, Red Giant Software and proDAD when purchased at NVIDIA.com.

Among the plug-ins being offered is the NVIDIA CUDA architecture-based Elemental Accelerator 2.0 for Windows from Elemental Technologies (MSRP $499 discounted to $249). By leveraging the CUDA parallel computing architecture, this new plug-in offloads H.264 video encoding to the Quadro GPU, enabling Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 users to experience a performance increase of up to 11X when compared to CPU-only video encoders. Now available on a range of Quadro GPUs, Elemental Accelerator 2.0 supports the creation of Blu-ray DVDs and web content using Flash. In addition, NVIDIA and Elemental Technologies are bringing accelerated H.264 video encoding capabilities to Mac Pro users for the first time with the new Elemental Accelerator 1.2 for Mac OS X running on the Quadro FX 4800 for Mac.

EVGA quietly slipped in the GeForce GTX 285 Mac Edition graphics card, which is its fastest offering to Mac users. The card uses a standard PCI-Express interface available with Intel x86 based Mac Pro workstations, and provides all the features of NVIDIA's fastest GPU. It is technically identical to its base-model PC counterpart, using a reference design for the PCB and cooler, reference clock speeds of 648/1476/2484 MHz (core/shader/memory), and 1 GB of GDDR3 memory across a 512-bit interface. It bundles the necessary power dongles, and packs system software for Mac. Two dual-link DVI connectors support two Apple Cinema displays with resolutions of 2560 x 1600 each. The OpenGL 3.0 acceleration backs the advanced drawing features of Adobe CS4 applications. EVGA is pricing this at US $449.99, a notch higher than the GTX 285 2 GB FTW accelerator for PC.

NVIDIA and Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that they are collaborating as part of the Open Screen Project to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player, a key component of the Adobe Flash Platform, to leverage GPU video and graphics acceleration on a wide range of mobile Internet devices, including netbooks, tablets, mobile phones and other on-the-go media devices.
Adobe Flash Player will be accelerated across the range of NVIDIA processors, including NVIDIA Tegra, enabling users to enjoy uncompromised Web browsing, full H.264 video playback and rich, consistent Flash technology based content any time, any place and on any platform.

Today's students and young professionals need a versatile notebook that can serve as their workhorse by day and entertainment center at night. The new Dell Studio 14z powered by the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor provides a perfect blend of performance and portability with graphics support for gaming, HD video, and creative self-expression.

The GeForce 9400M in the Dell Studio 14z delivers up to five times faster graphics performance than Centrino 2 notebooks to accelerate image editing, video playback, and video conversion. With vReveal, the Studio 14z can fix grainy, shaky video twice as fast as comparable notebooks, and then let you upload the video to YouTube in minutes.

Adobe Systems Incorporated and Intel Corporation today announced plans to collaborate on the development to port and optimize Adobe Flash technology for the Intel Media Processor CE 3100. This effort is expected to provide consumers with richer and more seamless Web-based and video viewing experiences through advanced Intel-based cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices. The high-definition capabilities of the Adobe Flash Platform, together with the Intel Media Processor CE 3100, the first in a new family of purpose-built Intel System on Chips (SoCs) for CE devices, creates a powerful entertainment hub capable of delivering rich Web content and Adobe Flash based applications to an array of Internet-connected CE devices. Intel and Adobe are working together to optimize both the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flash Lite for the CE3100. Intel plans to ship the first CE3100 with support for an optimized implementation of Adobe Flash Lite before mid-2009.

Adobe announced its major update to the Flash technology. The company released Flash Player 10, which is available for download for all popular browsers and platforms. This release of Flash Player provides a new consumption platform for content created by the new and enhanced Adobe Creativity Suite CS4. Notable features include:

• 3D Effects, GPU accelerated graphics that utilize the power of GPU to render animations
• Custom Filters and Effects
• Advanced Text Support
• Dynamic Sound Generation

Flash Player 10 is available for download here. Press release follows:

NVIDIA today introduced its new accelerator for Adobe Creative Suite 4 software, the NVIDIA Quadro CX. This new GPU provides creative professionals with a faster, better, more reliable way to maximize their creativity. Quadro CX was architected to deliver the best performance for the new GPU-optimized features of Adobe Creative Suite 4.

NVIDIA today announced that Adobe will natively support its graphics processing units (GPUs) in their newly announced Adobe Creative Suite 4. Adobe is the latest visual computing company to grab on to the massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs for more than just rendering pixels to the screen. With NVIDIA GPU acceleration, Adobe Creative Suite 4 enables a faster, more natural way of working with images, while improving quality and productivity. The latest edition in a long line of award-winning software toolsets, Adobe Creative Suite 4 is the first application set of its kind to take advantage of the power of native GPU acceleration.

A relatively unknown brand, Cherrypal introduced a PC module dubbed 'cloud computer'. It carries a price tag of US $250. Sure you do find pre-owned full-size PCs for that price, but just think of it: this PC consumes a mere 2W of power when idle (excludes the consumption of monitor and other peripherals).

On the features front, there's enough computing power to get you onto the internet, it is driven by a 400 MHz Freescale MPC5121e mobileGT triple-core processor, 256 MB DDR2 memory and 4 GB of NAND flash memory to store the OS, a Debian-derived Linux OS, Mozilla Firefox as the core internet application (supports all add-ons and Linux media plugins). 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, VGA out, and stereo audio out. It beats the $929 VidaBox PC convincingly at its price-point. Sure, such devices are mere toys for average users like us sitting cozy with powerful gaming PCs, but such devices are a step in the right direction, towards Cloud Computing.

Cloud computing, a new buzzword in the computing industry, is the computing methodology where software is thin and light, and streamed onto a computer. A user accesses software either freely or on a subscription basis. All you need is a standards compiant web-browser, OS isn't a factor. This has gotten players such as Microsoft, Google, Adobe and others looking up to it as the next big thing. You don't need to buy those installation discs and throw gigabytes of hard-drive space at applications anymore.

Packard Bell, one of Europe's top consumer PC brands in Europe, will reveal the next generation of its ipower gaming desktop PC to the gaming community at the Electronic Sports World Cup, which is being held on 4-6 July 2008 in Paris. The new gaming PC is christened: ipower X2.0.

Selected as the official ESWC gaming system in 2007 and 2008, the ipower range had to be up to the task of meeting the demanding requirements of amateur and professional PC gamers. Packard Bell confirms its engagement to the PC gaming community by unveiling the ipower X2.0, a stunning combination of power, graphics performance, state-of-the-art cooling and ergonomics.

A sound mind in a sound body goes the saying. The magnificent chassis of the ipower X2.0 shows off its inner secrets including its components and build quality through a translucent siding with red LED trim lights. To satisfy the 30 per cent of PC gamers who say that design is one of the top selection criteria1, the Packard Bell design studio developed a sexy tower case that unites a black colour scheme with metal trim, transparent housing, gloss finish, bevelled angles and harmonious dimensions
(510 H x 217 l X 530 L).

In the past, Macs were sometimes argued to be better for image editing than Windows-based PCs. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure if this was true or a complete myth, but it looks like things may not be like that anymore with the introduction of Adobe's Windows-only 64-bit version of Photoshop Creative Suite 4. Until now, Adobe has strived to ensure that both the Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop come with similar features. However, due to a choice by Apple not to make the Carbon technology that is used to develop Photoshop available as 64-bit, Adobe has decided it will not be providing a 64-bit version of CS4. Adobe's product manager for Photoshop, John Nack, said:

We're not going to ship 64-bit native for Mac with CS4. We respect Apple's need to balance their resources and make decisions right for that platform. But it does have an impact on developers.

Adobe's preliminary testing suggests that the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4 will offer a performance boost of 8-12%, with the benefits being much greater for memory-intensive tasks due to its ability to take advantage of more than 4GB of memory.

The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which allows developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline, is finally coming to Linux. Adobe announced today that the pre-release alpha version of AIR for Linux is available immediately on the Adobe Labs site. Adobe shipped the 1.0 version of AIR for Windows and Mac last month but was forced to delay the Linux release. According to a FAQ on the Adobe site, the reason for the delay was that the AIR team had to "wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized." Adobe is also releasing an updated alpha version of the Flex Builder 3 for Linux to include support for AIR applications.

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that Microsoft has licensed Adobe Flash Lite software, Adobe's award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones. Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader LE software for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents including email attachments and web content. Both Adobe products will be made available to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, who license Windows Mobile software.

The flaws disclosed last week in Adobe System's Reader and Acrobat programs have been used to exploit computers since at least January via malicious banner advertisements, security analysts are reporting. Adobe issued patches last Wednesday for Reader and Acrobat, but the company did not detail the flaws. Problems with Adobe's software can potentially affect millions of PC users, since the company's software is widely used to read PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Most people regard PDFs as harmless. "From our standpoint, it appears that this PDF-based attack has been quite successful, affecting many thousands of users throughout the world," wrote Hon Lau on Symantec's Security Response Weblog. Greg McManus of iDefense Labs, the security arm of VeriSign, reported one of the vulnerabilities to Adobe in October, according to a post by the SANS Institute, a computer security organization.

Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 has been approved as an international standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO), according to a company executive. "Adobe has received word that the ballot for approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard ... has passed by a vote of 13-1," wrote Jim King, a senior principal scientist and PDF architect at Adobe, in a blog post Tuesday. After announcing its intentions to make PDF a standard in January, Adobe submitted PDF to the ISO's Technical Committee in July. Previously, specialized subsets of PDF -- PDF/Archive and PDF/Exchange -- have been approved as standards by ISO, and other subsets have been proposed as standards. The approval of PDF 1.7 will now serve as an "umbrella" standard that will help unify these different subsets. The ratification of PDF as an ISO standard means Adobe gives up some control over the development of future versions. Instead of setting the future path of PDF on its own, Adobe will just be one of several parties with a say in how the standard evolves. And that's exactly what King, who was nominated technical editor of the new standard, hopes to see happen. "The challenging part will be to get people to participate in the next release of the standard. Lots of people want standards but it takes a measurable resource commitment to participate," he wrote.