AMD today revealed the world's first hardware virtualized GPU products -- AMD FirePro S-Series GPUs with Multiuser GPU (MxGPU) technology. AMD's ground-breaking hardware-virtualized GPU architecture delivers an innovative solution in response to emerging user experiences such as remote workstation, cloud gaming, cloud computing, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).

In the virtualization ecosystem, key components like the CPU, network controller and storage devices are being virtualized in hardware to deliver optimal user experiences, but prior to today the GPU was not hardware virtualized. AMD MxGPU technology, for the first time, brings the modern virtualization industry standard to the GPU hardware. What does this mean? Consistent performance and enhanced security across virtual machines. MxGPU controls GPU scheduling delivering predictable quality of service to the user.

FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme 5.60 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; the immediate availability of AIDA64 Engineer 5.60 software, a professional diagnostic and benchmarking solution for corporate IT technicians and engineers; the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business 5.60 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Network Audit 5.60 software, a dedicated network audit toolset to collect and manage corporate network inventories.

The new AIDA64 release introduces advanced SMART disk health monitoring, implements enhanced support for Samsung NVMe SSDs and various power supply units, and supports the latest graphics and GPGPU computing technologies by both AMD and NVIDIA.DOWNLOAD: FinalWire AIDA64 v5.60

Today at Autodesk University 2015, AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) unveiled the AMD FirePro W4300 for the best Computer-Aided Design (CAD) performance that fits both small form factor (SFF) and tower workstations. The AMD FirePro W4300 card expertly integrates a powerful GPU and 4GB of GDDR5 memory within a low-profile design for installation in SFF as well as full-sized systems. Organizations can now confidently simplify their IT management by standardizing on a single, capable professional graphics solution throughout their workstation deployment.

The AMD FirePro W4300 professional graphics card is optimized for the latest CAD applications including Autodesk AutoCAD, Inventor as well as Revit, Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS and CATIA, PTC Creo, Siemens NX, and many more. Engineering professionals can efficiently work with large geometry-intense models and apply GPU-accelerated features in their projects, such as the new Order Independent Transparency (OIT) mode supported in SOLIDWORKS. Users can help increase productivity by visualizing their workflows across up to six displays, and up to 4K and 5K resolution.

AMD today announced multiple new discrete AMD Embedded Radeon graphics options suitable for multiple form factors. The suite of products is specifically designed to advance the visual and parallel processing capabilities of embedded applications. The graphics cards represent continued AMD commitment to embedded market innovation, providing engineers with more choices to achieve their design goals, from leading performance to energy efficiency.

The new offerings cover a broad range of needs, from 192 GFLOPS to 3 TFLOPS of single precision performance, and from 20 to less than 95 watts of thermal design power. The products are offered as a Multi-Chip Module (MCM), Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) and PCIe options, with AMD offering the only MCM solutions. All of these products offer extended support and longevity. The new discrete graphics cards offer the right balance of performance, power and graphics memory size, to meet the needs of most customers.

"The demand for rich, vibrant graphics in embedded systems is greater than ever before, and that demand is growing," said Scott Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Embedded Solutions. "Our latest additions to the embedded product lineup help designers build mesmerizing user experiences with 4K multi-screen installations and 3-D and interactive displays. In addition, the powerful capabilities of our GPUs can address the toughest parallel compute challenges."

AMD today at VMworld 2015 demonstrated the world's first hardware-based GPU virtualization solution, the AMD Multiuser GPU. This new solution from AMD enables a virtualized workstation-class experience with full ISV certifications and local desktop-like performance. With the AMD Multiuser GPU, IT pros can easily configure these solutions to allow up to 15 users on a single AMD GPU. Demonstrations of AMD virtualization solutions can be found at VMworld 2015 booth 447.

"The AMD graphics cards are uniquely equipped with AMD Multiuser GPU technology embedded into the GPU delivering consistent and predictable performance," said Sean Burke, AMD corporate vice president and general manager, Professional Graphics. "When these AMD GPUs are appropriately configured to the needs of an organization, end users get the same access to the GPU no matter their workload. Each user is provided with the virtualized performance to design, create and execute their workflows without any one user tying up the entire GPU."

Built around industry standard SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) technology, the AMD Multiuser GPU continues AMD's embracement of non-proprietary open standards. SR-IOV is a specification developed by the PCI SIG, and provides a standardized way for devices to expose hardware virtualization. The AMD Multiuser GPU is designed to preserve and support graphics- and compute-accelerated features for design and manufacturing or media and entertainment applications. The AMD Multiuser GPU addresses limitations of current virtualized GPU solutions that may not provide predictable performance for CAD/CAE, Media and Entertainment, and general enterprise GPU needs.

AMD today announced the new AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU, the world's first and fastest 32GB single-GPU server card for DGEMM heavy double-precision workloads, with support for OpenCL 2.0. Based on the second-generation AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture, this new addition to the AMD FirePro server GPU family is capable of delivering up to 5.24 TFLOPS of peak single precision compute performance while enabling full throughput double precision performance, providing up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance. Designed with compute-intensive workflows in mind, the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU is ideal for data center managers who oversee clusters within academic or government bodies, oil and gas industries, or deep neural network compute cluster development.

"AMD is recognized as an HPC industry innovator as the graphics provider with the top spot on the November 2014 Green500 List. Today the best GPU for compute just got better with the introduction of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU to complement AMD's impressive array of server graphics offerings for high performance compute environments," said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group. "The AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU can accelerate complex workloads in scientific computing, data analytics, or seismic processing, wielding an industry-leading 32GB of memory. We designed the new offering for supercomputers to achieve massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets."

Someone with access to an AMD Radeon Fury sample put it through the compute performance test of GFXBench, and submitted its score to the suite's online score database. Running on pre-launch drivers, the sample is read as simply "AMD Radeon Graphics Processor." Since a GPGPU app is aware of how many compute units (CUs) a GPU has (so it could schedule its parallel processing workloads accordingly), GFXBench was able to put out a plausible-sounding CU count of 64. Since Radeon Fury is based on Graphics CoreNext, and since each CU holds 64 stream processors, the stream processor count on the chip works out to be 4,096.

TechPowerUp announced the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics system information, monitoring, and diagnostic utility. Version 0.8.3 adds support for new GPUs, updates support for existing ones, adds new features, and addresses some bugs. To begin with, GPU-Z adds a new feature that tells you if the video BIOS embeds a UEFI module or not, letting you use some of the newer OS features such as Secure Boot and Fast Boot.

GPU-Z 0.8.3 comes with support for new and upcoming GPUs, such as NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 965M, GTX 950M, NVS315, and GT 750 (GK106). On the AMD front, it adds support for AMD "Fiji" GPU, with its new memory technology; and "Mullins" APU (Radeon R2 and R3 series). It also adds support for the integrated graphics cores inside several Intel Core "Broadwell" CPUs. OpenCL detection code is improved, and a missing PerfCap sensor bug is fixed.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.8.3 | GPU-Z 0.8.3 ASUS ROG Themed

The complete change-log follows.

Tech Source, Inc., an independent supplier of high performance embedded video, graphics, and high end computing solutions, has released the Condor 4000 3U VPX form factor graphics/video card. Designed for compute-intensive General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) applications deployed in avionics and military technology, the Condor 4000 3U VPX graphics card delivers up to 768/48 GFLOPS of peak single/double precision floating point performance and 640 shaders with the AMD Radeon E8860 GPU at its core.

The Condor 4000 3U VPX card is for seriously high-end graphics, parallel processing, and situation awareness image and sensor processing applications such as radar, sonar, video streaming, and unmanned systems. The new card operates at higher speeds than an XMC form factor equivalent card as it occupies a dedicated slot to allow for better cooling which enables it to run at 45 Watts full power.

NVIDIA released its latest "Game Ready" marked and WHQL-signed GeForce drivers, in the run up to a big game release - Grand Theft Auto V (GTA-V), in this case. NVIDIA also took the opportunity to bump its version numbering to R350, with the GeForce 350.12 WHQL numbering these drivers are being released with, today. These drivers come with a boat-load of optimizations for GTA-V, including SLI profiles, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) support, and GeForce Experience optimal settings. GTA-V supports NVIDIA-exclusive features such as MFAA, TXAA, percentage-closer soft-shadows (PCSS), 4K surround, and more. The R350 driver series also introduces OpenCL 1.2 support.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 350.12 WHQL Game Ready for GTA-V: Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit

Despite WHQL-signed driver releases almost every other week, NVIDIA still seems to find time or reason for stopgap releases such as the new GeForce 350.05 Hotfix drivers, which quickly address a pressing issue with the latest WHQL-signed drivers (349.88 in this case). The driver fixes a crash with DirectX error message on Battlefield: Hardline. It also fixes a crash with Dragon Age: Inquisition. Expreview reports that NVIDIA also quietly slipped in OpenCL 1.2 support with the new driver, which could be one of the highlights of NVIDIA's upcoming R350 drivers.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 350.05 Hotfix

Valve announces a number of product and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. "We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months," said Gabe Newell, Valve's president. "With these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum."

Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend your Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today at its Future of Compute event announced the addition of its first high performance system-on-a-chip (SoC), codenamed "Carrizo", and a mainstream SoC codenamed "Carrizo-L" as part of the company's 2015 AMD Mobile APU family roadmap. In collaboration with hardware and software partners, these new 2015 AMD Mobile APUs are designed as complete solutions for gaming, productivity applications, and ultra high-definition 4K experiences. With support for Microsoft DirectX 12, OpenCL 2.0, AMD's Mantle API, AMD FreeSync and support for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 operating system, the 2015 AMD Mobile APU family enables the experiences consumers expect.

"We continue to innovate and build upon our existing IP to deliver great products for our customers," said John Byrne, senior vice president and general manager, Computing and Graphics business group, AMD. "AMD's commitment to graphics and compute performance, as expressed by our goal to improve APU energy efficiency 25x by 2020, combines with the latest industry standards and fresh innovation to drive the design of the 2015 AMD Mobile APU family. We are excited about the experiences these new APUs will bring and look forward to sharing more details in the first half of next year."

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that AMD A-Series APUs, AMD Radeon graphics and AMD FirePro professional graphics deliver superior performance to unlock the full potential of the latest features and capabilities announced by Adobe for its flagship Adobe Creative Cloud professional video tools and workflows. New high performance AMD-powered OpenCL debayering for Phantom Cine and Canon RAW camera formats joins previously unannounced debayering of RedR3D, CinemaDNG, and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera JPEG formats, unlocking real-time editing, effects and color grading for massive production productivity and lightning fast rendering to deliver projects on time and at high quality.

"Speed and performance are essential ingredients that ensure video producers are productive every day and successfully compete for business, engagement and client satisfaction," said Steve Belt, corporate vice president, Strategic Alliances and Platform Enablement, AMD. "Pros know that they can rely on the combination of OpenCL support in Adobe Creative Cloud and the associated AMD hardware acceleration to deliver a steady stream of advanced tools that set them apart creatively and productively."

AMD today announced that its APUs and GPUs enable accelerated performance for powerful new creative workflow features available for Adobe Creative Cloud members. The latest additions to Adobe Photoshop CC will take advantage of AMD acceleration to provide valuable creativity and productivity tools. Some of these tools include motion blur effects for the next generation of Blur Gallery, a focus selection feature that enables users to quickly select in-focus areas of an image and an enhanced image resample option that preserves fine details when upscaling images.

"The collaboration of AMD and Adobe assures creative professionals access to the performance they need to make the most of incredible new features as they become available across Adobe Creative Cloud," said Steve Belt, corporate vice president, Strategic Alliances & Platform Enablement, AMD. "AMD acceleration connects the fantastic creative and productivity enhancements in Adobe Photoshop CC to the compute performance required for an effortless user experience."

Red Hat Summit 2014 -- AMD today announced another major milestone in the development of its enterprise software ecosystem with the first public demonstration of its second-generation AMD Opteron X-Series APU, codenamed "Berlin," running a Linux environment based on the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution, providing a familiar, enterprise class operating environment to developers and IT administrators worldwide. This is important to companies looking to transition to x86 APU servers but who are reluctant to introduce new tools and software platforms to their IT environments. This demonstration also represents a significant step forward in expanding the footprint of x86 APU accelerated performance within the data center.

AMD's premiere demonstration of "Berlin" will showcase the world's first Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) featured server APU ahead of its official launch later this year. The demonstration features advancements incorporated in "Project Sumatra" that enable Java applications to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) within AMD server APUs. The combination of Linux and Java on AMD APU platforms provides an ideal platform for server-based multimedia workloads and general purpose GPU compute that will help drive new levels of workload efficiency in the data center. AMD also will demonstrate software-based on OpenCL and OpenGL on "Berlin."

Finalwire released the latest update to AIDA64, popular system information, diagnostic, and bechmarking suite. Version 4.30 builds on its predecessors by adding support for new hardware, newer versions of Windows, new technologies, and offers a new benchmark. To begin with, it adds support for Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update 1. It also adds support / detection for NVIDIA's new CUDA 6.0 GPGPU API. Among the new hardware support are the AMD socket AM1 platform, Intel "Broadwell" CPUs, early support for AMD "Carrizo" and "Toronto" APUs, early support for Intel "Skylake," "Cherry Trail," and "Denverton" CPUs. Among the new GPUs supported, are AMD Radeon R7 265, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745, and the 800M series. A new OpenCL SHA-1 hash benchmark is added.DOWNLOAD: Finalwire AIDA64 v4.30 (installer) | Finalwire AIDA64 v4.30 (ZIP package)

AMD today announced that it has delivered significant optimizations in the graphics processing pipeline to increase performance for powerful creative features and workflows in the newest version of Adobe Photoshop CC. Use of both OpenCL and OpenGL standards enables Adobe Photoshop CC to directly tap the compute and graphics processing capabilities of AMD FirePro Professional Graphics, AMD Radeon Graphics, and AMD A-Series APUs to unlock new levels of performance in the Smart Sharpen filter, and provide highly responsive, visually accurate experiences for the new 3D printing workflows, and transformations such as Perspective Warp.

"Compute performance is essential to effective creative workflows," said Steve Belt, corporate vice president, Strategic Alliances & Platform Enablement, AMD. "An efficient, speedy process is often the difference between successfully capturing inspiration and seeing flashes of brilliance ebb away. That is the real essence of what the AMD-Adobe collaboration achieves. Together we continually find ways to successfully tap open standards in order to deliver the highest levels of performance for the most sophisticated new tools like those unveiled today in Photoshop CC."

AMD announced dual AMD FirePro professional graphics solutions (GPUs) deliver unprecedented levels of performance for the new Mac Pro. The AMD FirePro D300, D500 and D700 professional GPUs offer exceptional compute power and reliability for creativity and productivity in a wide range of applications. With industry-adopted OpenCL (Open Computing Language) support, Mac Pro users have the ability to seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K video and simultaneously render effects in the background, and still have enough performance to power up to three high-resolution 4K displays.

These new AMD FirePro GPUs are built on the strength of AMD's award-winning Graphics Core Next GPU design -- an architecture conceived from the ground up to intelligently manage rendering and compute workloads. The combination of AMD FirePro GPUs and OpenCL -- strongly supported by both Apple and AMD -- is designed to deliver massive compute and graphics performance in one compact solution.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the finalized OpenCL 2.0 specification. OpenCL 2.0 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard that simplifies cross-platform, parallel programming.

With an enhanced execution model and a subset of the C11 and C++11 memory model, synchronization and atomic operations, OpenCL now enables a significantly richer range of algorithms and programming patterns to be easily accelerated with improved performance. Significant feedback from the developer community was incorporated into the final specification, following its provisional release in July. The OpenCL 2.0 specifications are available at www.khronos.org/opencl.

AMD today announced it is enabling its accelerated processing units (APU) for next-generation servers through important advancements in software tools developed by AMD and in collaboration with technology partners and the open source community. In his keynote address at APU13, AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers highlighted the significant progress AMD has made in both developing software internally and empowering others to develop software to take advantage of the capabilities of AMD APU technology, which combines industry leading AMD Radeon graphics processing engines with x86 computational processing on a single chip.

"Servers must be efficient, scalable and adaptable to meet the compute characteristics of new and changing workloads. Software applications that leverage server APUs are designed to drive highly efficient, low-power, dense server solutions optimized for highly parallel and multimedia workloads," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. "We have evolved our processor roadmap to support this opportunity, and now we are showcasing how the APU software ecosystem is gaining momentum and what developers can do to participate."

As a follow-up to our older article on how December-January will play out for AMD's next-generation APU lineup, we have news that the company will unveil, or at least tease its next-generation desktop APU, codename "Kaveri," on November 11, 2013. It's when the company will host its APU'13 event, modeled along the lines of GPU'13, held in Hawaii this September, where it unveiled its Radeon R9 200 and R7 200 GPU families. On its backdrop, the company will also hold its 2013 AMD Developer Summit, which brings together developers making software that take advantage of both CPU and OpenCL-accelerated GPUs. APU'13 will be held in San Jose, USA, and like GPU'13, will be live-streamed to the web. In addition to new APUs, the company is expected to make some big announcements with its HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) initiative that brought some big names in the industry on board.The agenda for APU'13 follows.

At its press meet called to unveil its next-generation graphics lineup, which lasted for about 3 hours and 45 minutes, a full one hour was spent detailing TrueAudio, an audio DSP that AMD co-developed with GenAudio, makers of AstoundSound technology; both of which are brand names we'd heard for the first time, and that's coming from someone who's been an audiophile and follower of PC audio technology for 15 years now. Here are a few reasons why the concept of TrueAudio, or at least the way AMD and its newfound GenAudio pals explained it, is unconvincing to the extant of flagging "snake oil." While we did not attend GPU'14, experiencing TrueAudio is irrelevant to our analysis. It focuses on what "yet another" positional audio DSP has to do with GPU, and how AMD is getting ahead of itself with non-graphics features in exactly the same way it criticized NVIDIA of doing, not too long ago.

At this year's IBC (International Broadcasting Convention), AMD is collaborating with outstanding industry leaders -- Adobe, Autodesk, Blackmagic Design, Dell, Fusion-io, and Supermicro -- to showcase video production workflows with a variety of 4K sources using AMD FirePro professional graphics. These demonstrations feature compute- and graphics-intensive animation, display, and content creation supported by a host of creative hardware and software collaborations.

AMD is pleased to showcase ground breaking demonstrations at IBC 2013 powered by AMD FirePro graphics:

• First public showing of real-time 4K color correction with Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 10 and Supermicro with multiple GPU support;
• First implementation of edge blending, image warping, and color correction with Scalable Display solution based on AMD FirePro DOPP (Display Output Post-Processing) feature;
• New Direct Graphics-Memory Access features for low-latency SDI input or output directly from AMD FirePro W-series graphics;
• New Dell mobile workstation lineup with AMD FirePro graphics;
• 4K color calibration, 2D / 3D video effects and post production using OpenCL in Adobe Premiere Pro CC;
• Integrated stereo camera within Autodesk 3ds Max with support for Active Stereo;
• OpenCL-accelerated Bullet Physics extension for Autodesk Maya 2014.

AMD today announced that its collaboration with Adobe has reached a new milestone in the drive to deliver faster and more sophisticated professional video workflows. The two companies' leadership in OpenCL acceleration means that video and film professionals, as well as enthusiasts, can take full advantage of the massively parallel compute power of AMD APUs, Radeon graphics, and AMD FirePro professional graphics in their everyday and more compute-intense workloads.

New breakthrough features and efficient workflows announced by Adobe for Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe SpeedGrade CC, and Adobe Media Encoder CC exploit AMD App Acceleration via OpenCL and deliver streamlined, leading edge support for Blackmagic Design and Vision Research Phantom cameras.