"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.

The future of AMD's GPU architecture looks more open, broken from the shackles of a fixed-function, DirectX-driven evolution model, and that which increases the role of GPU in the PC's central processing a lot more than merely accelerating GPGPU applications. At the Fusion Developer Summit, AMD detailed its future GPU architecture, revealing that in the future, AMD's GPUs will have full support for C, C++, and other high-level languages. Integrated with Fusion APUs, these new number-crunching components will be called "scalar co-processors".

Scalar co-processors will combine elements of MIMD (multiple-instruction multiple-data,) SIMD (single-instruction multiple data), and SMT (simultaneous multithreading). AMD will ditch the VLIW (very long instruction word) model that has been in use for several of AMD's past GPU architectures. While AMD's GPU model will break from the shackles of development that is pegged to that of DirectX, it doesn't believe that APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL will be discarded. Game developers can continue to develop for these APIs, and C++ support is more for general purpose compute applications. That does, however, create a window for game developers to venture out of the API-based development model (specifically DirectX). With its next Fusion processors, the GPU and CPU components will make use of a truly common memory address space. Among other things, this eliminate the "glitching" players might sometimes experience when games load textures as they go over the crest of a hill.

What happens when you pit Intel's "Visually Smart" Sandy Bridge processors against Radeon-enriched AMD Fusion A-Series accelerated processing units? They do terribly at gaming on integrated graphics. Surprise! That is notwithstanding the fact that AMD is pitching its A-Series Fusion APUs to be a lot more than CPUs with embedded GPUs, they're pitched to be processors that make lower-mainstream graphics pointless, and to alter the software ecosystem to be more GPGPU intensive, so applications could benefit from the over 500 GFLOPs of computation power the 400 stream processor DirectX 11 GPU brings to the table.

A leaked presentation slide shows AMD's performance projections for the A-Series GPU, tests included GPU-heavy DirectX 10 titles such as Crysis Warhead and Borderlands; as well as DirectX 11 ready titles such as Dirt 2. AMD's quad-core A8-3850, A8-3650 and A8-3450 were included alongside Intel's dual-core Sandy Bridge Core i3-2100, and quad-core Core i5-2300, Core i5-2500K. The Atom-competitive E350 Zacate dual-core was also in the comparision, perhaps to show that it is nearly as good as Intel's much higher segment Core series processors at graphics.

AMD charted out the launch itinerary of its two upcoming client product lines, the A-Series "Llano" accelerated processing unit (APU), and the FX-Series "Zambezi" processor, in a presentation slide to its launch partners. The series of product launches starts at the upcoming Computex 2011 event, on June 1, where AMD will launch its new 9-series chipset. This could include two branches: first being the 2-chip chipset that drives Zambezi FX-series processors; and a second single-chip chipset for APUs. The action then shifts to E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) a week after Computex. On June 7, AMD will unveil the AM3+ platform, and motherboard vendors across the board are expected to show off their AM3+ motherboards

On 12th June AMD's Llano APU and Sabine platform will be launched for the Asian markets. Around the same time, at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, AMD will interact with developers to develop software that's tailor made for the Fusion architecture (x86 with increased use of serial computational loads over GPGPU). June 14 2011 is the most important date. Called the AMD 2011 Client Launch Event, this event will be the launchpad for AMD's FX-series processors and A-Series APUs. Sabine platform will launched to the rest of the world's markets.

Today at Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2011, AMD introduced the AMD Radeon E6760 embedded discrete graphics processor. Available now, the AMD Radeon E6760 GPU is the first of its kind to offer embedded system designers the combination of OpenCL support along with support for six independent displays.

"The AMD Radeon E6760 GPU provides customers with superior business economics through long lifecycle management and product stability," said Richard Jaenicke, director of Embedded Client Business for AMD. "Embedded system designers faced with power and density constraints now have a solution that delivers the advanced 3D graphics and multimedia features they require in this performance-driven market."

NVIDIA today announced the latest version of the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit for developing parallel applications using NVIDIA GPUs. The NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 Toolkit was designed to make parallel programming easier, and enable more developers to port their applications to GPUs. This has resulted in three main features:

• NVIDIA GPUDirect 2.0 Technology -- Offers support for peer-to-peer communication among GPUs within a single server or workstation. This enables easier and faster multi-GPU programming and application performance.
• Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA) -- Provides a single merged-memory address space for the main system memory and the GPU memories, enabling quicker and easier parallel programming.
• Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitives Libraries -- Provides a collection of powerful open source C++ parallel algorithms and data structures that ease programming for C++ developers. With Thrust, routines such as parallel sorting are 5X to 100X faster than with Standard Template Library (STL) and Threading Building Blocks (TBB).

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer, and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., announces the S8225 workstation motherboard. With support for two six-core AMD Opteron 4100 series processors and up to four double-wide PCI-E 2.0 GPGPU compute accelerators, the S8225 is ideal for graphics workstation and personal supercomputing applications.

"The S8225 workstation motherboard enables price sensitive customers to experience GPU computing performance," stated TYAN Director of Product Marketing, Kevin Hart. "The AMD Opteron 4100 series processors provide improved power efficiency at a lower cost."

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the world's first graphics card designed specifically for the embedded market with the VIA eH1, a DX10.1 compliant, multi-display card that thrusts any system with a PCI Express slot into a new realm of graphics and video capability.

The VIA eH1 comes with a three year product longevity guarantee and is the most power-efficient discrete graphics and video solution on the market today. The VIA eH1 AIB features an advanced DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible 64-bit architecture and offers multi-stream 1080p HD video decoding and Stereoscopic 3D rendering capability. This makes it the ideal solution for a range of embedded applications that require advanced graphics and video on multiple displays.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer, and a subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., today announced four server platforms that are fully compatible with AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators.

The AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators are general purpose graphics processing units that deliver exceptional floating point processing capabilities, and are used widely in HPC, cloud and enterprise-scale applications, helping reduce cycle times with up to 2.64 TFLOPs of single precision performance.

Eurocom, the world's leading developer of desktop Workstation replacement notebook technology is pleased to introduce the NVIDIA GTX480M GPU in SLI and the HD5870 in CrossfireX to its line of Mobile Workstation notebooks. The NVIDIA GTX 480M introduces the power of NVIDIA's FERMI architecture to the mobile form factor. FERMI is designed from the ground up to be an incredibly powerful GPGPU (General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Unit) architecture. With DX11, CUDA, and PHYSX, the GTX480M can accelerate not only 3D applications, but other utility applications as well. Offering up 897 gigaflops of processing power plus up to 2GB of GDDR5 graphics memory, the GTX480M provides incredible speed for gamers and professionals alike.

NVIDIA SLI Technology enables optimized applications to utilize two NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards to improve graphics performance by up to 100%. By combining two GTX480M GPUs in SLI consumers receive the most powerful mobile graphics solution available from NVIDIA. ATI CrossfireX Technology enables optimized applications to utilize two ATI Radeon graphics cards to improve graphics performance by up to 100%. By combining two Mobility HD5870 GPUs in CrossfireX consumers receive the most powerful mobile graphics solution available from ATI.

In several of its communications about Fermi as a GPGPU product (Next-Gen Tesla series) and GF100 GPU, NVIDIA mentioned the GF100 GPU to have 512 physical CUDA cores (shader units) on die. In the run up to the launch of GeForce 400 series however, it appears as if GeForce GTX 480, the higher-end part in the series will have only 480 of its 512 physical CUDA cores enabled, sources at Add-in Card manufacturers confirmed to Bright Side of News. This means that 15 out of 16 SMs will be enabled. It has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface holding 1536 MB of memory.

This could be seen as a move to keep the chip's TDP down and help with yields. It's unclear if this is a late change, because if it is, benchmark scores of the product could be different when it's finally reviewed upon launch. The publication believes that while the GeForce GTX 480 targets a price point around $449-499, while the GeForce GTX 470 is expected to be priced $299-$349. The GeForce GTX 470 has 448 CUDA cores and a 320-bit GDDR5 memory interface holding 1280 MB of memory. In another report by Donanim Haber, the TDP of the GeForce GTX 480 is expected to be 298W, with GeForce GTX 470 at 225W. NVIDIA will unveil the two on the 26th of March.

"This puppy here, is Fermi" announced a proud Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's CEO. The shiny, chrome-decked Tesla GPGPU accelerator that makes use of NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, soon turned out to be a mock-up, aimed solely at announcing the completion of development of the Fermi architecture. It was also strategically timed to coincide with AMD's market launch of the industry's first DirectX 11 compliant graphics cards under the Fermi is significant since it supports the DirectX 11 API. Today ironically, on the occasion of AMD's launch of its "Hemlock" Radeon HD 5970 flagship accelerator, a picture showing a working consumer graphics variant of Fermi working. It is as if to assert that a Fermi derivative is no more the paperweight it was when it was first paraded to the media.

NVIDIA's Fermi GPU architecture is to be implemented in three variants: GF100, GT300, and GT300GL, to drive three of the company's product lines: GeForce, Tesla, and Quadro, respectively. GF100 is of utmost relevance to us. A picture leaked recently to Bright Side of News shows a GeForce accelerator based on GF100 to be working, where it appears to be rendering the Unigine Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark. This early sighting, however, doesn't mean that the product is any closer to its launch. It is still slated for Q1 2010, meaning that it will miss out on the X-Mas shopping season. The GF100 GPU is said to have 512 shader cores, and connects to GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.

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

As part of its Financial Analyst Day for 2009, AMD listed out its priorities for the year ahead, looking into 2010. While the company has lived up to its development targets for this year by releasing a full-fledged lineup of PC and server processors built on the 45 nm process, increasing its market share with graphics products, and releasing the first DirectX 11 compliant (back then referred to as 'next generation') GPU, the year ahead looks equally ambitious for AMD.

AMD set the following product priorities for 2010: to deliver four new winning PC platforms in the first half of 2010, improve battery life of its notebook platform, expand homegrown DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL developer tools, propagate DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks, launch the company's first 12-core Opteron processor, and more interestingly, sample the company's next-generation "Bulldozer" architecture to industry customers, along with sampling the company's first Fusion-design "Bobcat" processor, which integrates the CPU with GPU, along with sampling some of the company's first processors built on the 32 nm manufacturing process.

EVGA's Halloween offering, the mystical graphics accelerator with two different GPUs - each handing one kind of task - is official. Behold the EVGA GTX 275 Co-op PhysX accelerator. This unique graphics accelerator uses an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 GPU to handle the primary task of graphics processing, while offloads GPGPU related tasks, such as game physics acceleration using the company's PhysX technology, to a second GeForce GTS 250 GPU. While the GTX 275 component has 896 MB of GDDR3 memory across its usual 448-bit wide interface, the GTS 250 has 512 MB of it across its 256-bit wide interface, 1280 MB total on board (though not the total amount of memory available to a 3D application).

While not intended to be a true dual-GPU accelerator in essence that the two GPUs work in tandem to render graphics, the design ensures that the GeForce GTX 275 works with zero overhead from processing PhysX. The two GPUs are not part of an SLI multi-GPU array. With the provision of two SLI fingers, users can pair up to three of these in a 3-way SLI array. It is logically possible to pair this with other normal GeForce GTX 275 accelerators as well.

ASUS, in collaboration with NVIDIA and the National Chao Tung University of Taiwan, has introduced the ESC 1000 desktop-sized supercomputer, that harnesses the power of GPGPU, to give out 1.1 TFLOPs of computational power. Enclosed in a 445 x 217.5 x 545 mm chassis (the size of tower server/workstation chassis,) is a system powered by an Intel Xeon W3580 "Nehalem" 3.33 GHz processor, aided by 24 GB of system memory. As many as three NVIDIA Tesla c1060 GPGPU cards are installed, with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 handing graphics. These emphasize that the system is meant for highly complex visual computing, such as in the fields of highly complex modeling, and scientific research. The pricing and availability of the ESC 1000 is not known as yet.

S3 Graphics　announced the latest addition to its power-efficient embedded graphics processor family, with the unveiling of the OpenCL 1.0 capable Chrome 5400E GPGPU processor. The S3 Graphics 5400E will be unveiled at the Electronic Manufacturer Exposition (eMEX), October 22nd - 25th, in Suzhou, China at the Suzhou International Expo Center, Hall 4A, Booth No. 4K08.

OpenCL is an open, cross-platform standard used to harness the power of a GPUs internal shaders to accelerate parallel computations in applications ranging from scientific, medical, and other high performance computing (HPC) markets. The native OpenCL engine in the 5400E GPU enables our partners to go beyond graphics and video, and penetrate these diverse HPC markets.

Unveiled at the footnote of the GPU Technology Conference 2009, by none other than NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's Fermi architecture looks promising, at least in the field of GPGPU, which was extensively discussed upon in his address. The first reference board based on NVIDIA's newest 'GT300' GPU is a Tesla HPC processor card, which quickly became the face of the Fermi architecture. Singapore HardwareZone, and PCPop caught some of the first closeup pictures of the Tesla accelerator, and the GPU's BGA itself. Decked in a dash of chrome, the Tesla HPC processor card isn't particularly long, instead a great deal of compacting by its designers is evident. It draws power from one 8-pin, and 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, which aren't located next to each other. The cooler's blower also draws air from openings in the PCB, and a backplate further cools the GPU (and possibly other components located) from behind. From the looks of it, the GPU package itself isn't larger than that of the GT200 or its predecessor, the G80. Looks like NVIDIA is ready with a working prototype against all odds, after all, doesn't it? Not quite. On close inspection of the PCB, it doesn't look like a working sample. Components that are expected to have pins protruding soldered on the other side, don't have them, and the PCB seems to be abruptly ending. Perhaps it's only a dummy made to display at GTC, and give an indication of how the card ends up looking like. In other words, it doesn't look like NVIDIA has a working prototype/sample of the card they intended to have displayed the other day.

In the tussle between its own CUDA GPGPU standard and the OpenCL, NVIDIA is making the right moves by offering its first drivers for OpenCL GPGPU acceleration. The drivers are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Any CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU will be able to use these. The drivers can be downloaded from here, which provide compliance with OpenCL 1.0.

NVIDIA has also released the OpenCL Visual Profiler software that helps developers improve their code by recognizing possible bottlenecks and room for improvements. At a higher level, it profiles actual hardware signals, kernel efficiency, and instruction issue rate; memory latencies; auto-analysis to point of serialization problems, among other things. More information on this can be found here.

AMD is ready with the industry's first WHQL-certified set of drivers for Microsoft Windows 7. The Catalyst WHQL Windows 7 driver comes as yet another first for AMD, and a first for Microsoft's Windows 7 certification program. Dated 5/5/2009, the drivers carry the version 8.612, feature full support for Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.1 and works with ATI Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, and HD 4000 series. The drivers also provide support for ATI Stream GPGPU technology.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.612 WHQL for Windows 7 64-bit, and Windows 7 32-bit.

NVIDIA is pushing forth a special variant of its high-end GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator. This one is specific for use in Apple Mac systems that support PCI-Express addon-cards. Its hardware specifications remain the same: 240 stream processors and 1 GB of 512-bit GDDR3 memory. Available in June, the accelerator will benefit the upcoming Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" that makes use of GPGPU. NVIDIA partner EVGA seems to be ready with one. Pictured below, the card resembles the reference design accelerator commonly available for PCs.

GPU-accelerated physics is turning out to be the one part of specifications AMD is yearning for. One of NVIDIA's most profitable acquisitions in recent times, has been that of Ageia technologies, and its PhysX middleware API. NVIDIA went on to port the API to its proprietary CUDA GPGPU architecture, and is now using it as a significant PR-tool apart from a feature that is genuinely grabbing game developers' attention. In response to this move, AMD's initial reaction was to build strategic technology alliance with the main competitor of PhysX: Havok, despite its acquisition by Intel.

In the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) event, AMD may materialize its plans to bring a GPU-accelerated version of Havok, which has till now been CPU-accelerated. The API has featured in several popular game titles such as Half Life 2, Max Payne II, and some other Valve Source-based titles. ATI's Terry Makedon, in his Twitter-feed has revealed that AMD would put forth its "ATI GPU Physics strategy." He also added that the company would present a tech-demonstration of Havok technology working in conjunction with ATI hardware. The physics API is expected to utilize OpenCL and AMD Stream.

S3 Graphics today announced the latest addition to its power-efficient Chrome 500 Series graphics processor family, with the unveiling of an 850MHz clocked GDDR3 based Chrome 540 GTX. Today's users can convert an ordinary PC into a Hi-Def entertainment powerhouse for Dual-Stream Blu-ray and HD videos, using the newly defined DisplayPort digital interface, HDMI and Dual-Link DVI for seamless connectivity to the latest digital monitors and HDTVs.

Today's multimedia enthusiasts require extra GPU horsepower to perform high-quality HD video decoding, image post-processing, and stunning color enhancement when displaying the latest HD content on Blu-ray or streaming video-on-demand. With the Chrome 540 GTX, you now have the power to bring every movie experience to life, and enjoy bonus footage through Picture-in-Picture, all while enjoying 8 channels of high fidelity audio with the S3 Graphics built-in Dolby 7.1 digital surround sound processor.

NVIDIA adopted the marketing strategy of Graphics Plus, meaning that they intend to show their products as something more than just graphics hardware. The introduction of the CUDA GPGPU platform, and the subsequent introduction of GPU-acceleration physics in the form of NVIDIA PhysX helped the cause. The company released the Power Pack software delivery system back in August, which served as a mode for delivering not only system drivers, but also related content such as free games, technology demos, game demos, free software and software trials. The user can choose what to download, by customizing the Power Pack.

NVIDIA released Power Pack #2, the second major iteration, consisting of changes to the list of things that can be downloaded. The pack now includes Warmonger (full free game) with two new levels: Tombstone & Asylum. It includes three new tech demos, a PhysX accelerated screensaver, and most notably, trial versions of Power Director 7, TMPGENC XPRESS 4.6.2.266 and Badaboom media converter, all of which take advantage of GPU acceleration. Apart from these, the usual contents of Power Pack #1 are also included. At any point in time, the Power Pack includes the latest system drivers of NVIDIA Forceware, and PhysX system software. For more, please visit this page.

December ATI Catalyst Driver Release Automatically Switches on ATI Stream Acceleration in ATI Radeon Graphics Cards Found in Millions of PCs. To Enable Instant Benefit, Users Will Also Be Able to Download Free Avivo Video Converter That Makes High-Definition Video Conversion up to 17x Faster.

AMD today announced that starting next month, the company plans to release for download a free ATI Catalyst driver update that instantly unlocks new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of ATI Radeon graphics cards.