AMD is planning to release a revision of the Radeon R9 280X this late-November, based on the new "Tahiti-XTL" silicon. Originally designed to be based on that ASIC, the R9 280X ended up being based on "Tahiti XT2," the same exact ASIC that drives the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, as "Tahiti XTL" wasn't ready for its early-October launch. The new silicon promises lower power consumption, heat output, and in turn, lower fan noise output. AMD won't announce the revision, but perform a "running change" for its add-in board partners. The only way you'll be able to tell it's a "Tahiti XTL" based R9 280X, apart from disassembling the card, will be reading its BIOS.

AMD offers greater flexibility with its multi-GPU solutions, letting you mix and match any two GPUs based on the same silicon. It was quite natural to expect a Radeon R9 280X to work in tandem with a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition from the previous generation, since the two are based on the same "Tahiti" GPU, which is now proven. HardwareCanucks managed to run that combo without a hitch, and log performance results across a bouquet of game tests. The publication also notes that one should be able to similarly pair a Radeon R9 270X with a Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition (the one based on "Pitcairn," not "Tahiti LE"). Have a Radeon HD 7950? Feel free to add an R9 280X to the mix.

AMD announced market availability of several of its new Radeon R9 and Radeon R7 series discrete graphics SKUs. Leading the pack for today's launch is the Radeon R9 280X. Heavily based on the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, the card is priced at $299, and is designed to offer an interesting price-performance combination. In raw performance, it competes with the now $410 GeForce GTX 770, yet it's priced just $50 more than the $249 GeForce GTX 760. Based on the same 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon as the HD 7970 GHz Edition, it features clock speeds of 1000 MHz core, with 6.00 GHz memory. It features 2,048 stream processors, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 3 GB of memory.

The next card on AMD's block is the Radeon R9 270X, which is designed to strike a price-performance sweet-spot at $199. Essentially an overclocked Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition, the card is based on the 28 nm "Pitcairn" silicon, featuring clock speeds of 1050 MHz core, and 6.40 GHz memory. It features 1,280 stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. Lastly, there's the Radeon R7 260X, an interesting sub-$150 product, priced at $139. Based on the same "Bonaire" silicon as the Radeon HD 7790, it features higher clock speeds, and double the standard memory amount. It features clock speeds of 1100 MHz, and 6.50 GHz memory. The chip features 896 stream processors, 56 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. The three cards will launch through the various AMD add-in board (AIB) partners, in their non-reference designs.

Although Radeon R9 280X has a lot in common with Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, AMD's AIB partners are expected to come up with entirely new board designs. A case in point is the XFX Double Dissipation card, pictured below. While we don't know if XFX is recycling PCB designs over from the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the cooler certainly looks new, with its tall and chunky aluminium fin heatsink that's fed by copper heat-pipes, and a pair of 100 mm fans. Its box speaks of an "unlocked voltage" feature.

Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti XTL" silicon, Radeon R9 280X features 2,048 GCN stream processors, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 3 GB of memory. The GPU is expected to be clocked a notch above 1.00 GHz on XFX' card, and the memory around 6.40 GHz. Slated for October 3rd, the card is expected to be priced anywhere between $299 and $329.

Here's a quick recap of AMD's updated product stack, spread between the R9 and R7 series. This article can help you understand the new nomenclature. AMD's lineup begins with the Radeon R7 250 and Radeon R7 260X. The two are based on the 28 nm "Curacao" silicon, which is a variation of the "Pitcairn" silicon the previous-generation Radeon HD 7870 was based on. The R7 250 is expected to be priced around US $89, with 1 GB of RAM, and performance rated at over 2,000 points by 3DMark Firestrike benchmark. The R7 260X, features double the memory at 2 GB, higher clock speeds, possibly more number crunching resources, Firestrike score of over 3,700 points, and a pricing that's around $139. This card should turn up the heat against the likes of GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost.

Moving on, there's the $199 Radeon R9 270X. Based on a chip not much unlike "Tahiti LE," it features 2 GB of memory, and 3DMark Firestrike score of over 5,500 points. Then there's the Radeon R9 280X. This card, priced attractively at $299, is practically a rebrand of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with. It features 3 GB of RAM, and over 6,800 points on 3DMark Firestrike. Then there are the R9 290 and R9 290X. AMD flew dozens of scribes thousands of miles over to Hawaii, and left them without an official announcement on the specifications of the two. From what AMD told us, the two feature 4 GB of memory, over 5,000 TFLOP/s compute power, and over 300 GB/s memory bandwidth. The cards we mentioned are pictured in that order below.More pictures follow.

HIS posted placeholders on its website for various Radeon Rx 200 series products, before redacting it, but not before VideoCardz took a screengrab. The placeholders reveal nothing about the products, but their names, which include GPU name, memory (type/amount), and custom cooling solution, if any. The Radeon R9 280X IceQ X² leads the pack for HIS. There's nothing known just yet, but the listing reveals 3 GB of GDDR5 memory, and a custom cooling solution by HIS. From the R9 280X, HIS jumps straight down to the mainstream R7 250, and R7 240, with IceQ and iCooler variants of each, and variants based on slower DDR3 memory. The codename "Tahiti XTL" is floating around with the R9 280X. It could be anything from a cut-down 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, to just a low-power variant of "Tahiti" as configured and clocked on the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. The real stuff (new high-end GPUs), is reserved for the R9 290 series (if there is one).A list of SKUs by HIS follows:

Ahead of its April 24 launch, AMD board vendors has been distributing marketing materials to their retail partners. One such retailer in Japan revealed the flagship graphics card's specifications sheet, revealing details such as clock speeds and GPU core configuration.

To begin with, AMD isn't compromising much on clock speeds on the HD 7990 "Malta," in an effort to lower power draw. The card features GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, which puts it above the single-GPU Radeon HD 7970, but not much lower than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, with its 1050 MHz. The memory is clocked at 6.00 GHz, on par with the HD 7970 GHz Edition, which yields a cumulative memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s.

NVIDIA updated its GPU micro-architecture roadmap at the 2013 GPU Technology Conference (GTC). Currently spearheaded by the "Kepler" micro-architecture, which drives its GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla product lines, and which will drive Tegra mobile SoCs in 2014; NVIDIA's next-generation "Maxwell" could make its debut some time in 2014. Going by NVIDIA's graph that puts performance-per-Watt against time, "Maxwell" should nearly double performance. Maxwell GPUs feature unified virtual memory, which lets CPUs treat graphics card memory as system memory, for faster general-purpose performance.

Although not backed by a tentative launch year, and assuming "Maxwell" has its run for another two years, 2016 could see the launch of NVIDIA's "Volta" GPU micro-architecture. In addition to advancements by its predecessors, "Volta" could introduce stacked DRAM technology. It would enable GPU memory bandwidths as high as 1 TB/s. Current high-end graphics cards such as GeForce Titan and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, are capable of breaching the 300 GB/s mark, so NVIDIA's claims don't sound far-fetched.

You may have read our report from earlier today, covering the main points that AMD was trying to make in its recent teleconference with the European press (which includes us). While in the call, we were a little jolted by the choices of words some of AMD's executives used to describe their company's consumer graphics outlook for 2013, how they believe they can hold out for almost the entire year with little or no major updates to their product stack, and more interestingly, a few above-the-belt jabs at NVIDIA and its upcoming GeForce GTX Titan product.

The crux of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was to bust some misconceptions spread in the press over the last couple of weeks, to tell them a Graham's Number of times that they still hold the fastest single GPU on the planet, which powers the fastest graphics card there is (ASUS ARES II). The most ironic part of AMD's emergency meeting with the press was the one in which they called GeForce Titan NVIDIA's emergency/knee-jerk reaction to AMD's getting cozy with game developers, and netting some of the biggest PC game launches of the season for its Never Settle Reloaded bundle.

While digging through documentation for the latest version of AMD Display Library (ADL), we discovered evidence that AMD is working on a real GPU dynamic overclocking technology akin to NVIDIA's GPU Boost. Such a technology could manipulate GPU (and possibly memory) clock speeds, and voltages across multiple power states, taking into account processing load and temperatures. ADL allows third-party applications low-level interactions with AMD display drivers. Current generation Radeon graphics cards use Overdrive 5 and the feature-set it comes with, and so the new technology, along with Overdrive 6 could feature on upcoming generations of AMD GPUs.

Listed under Overdrive 6 capabilities, AMD documented three new definitions, one which indicates that a GPU's core/engine clock can be changed within a range (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_SCLK_CUSTOMIZATION), one that its memory clock can be changed within range (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_MCLK_CUSTOMIZATION), and one that monitors its activity/load (ADL_OD6_CAPABILITY_GPU_ACTIVITY_MONITOR). The three are ingredients of a dynamic OC technology in the works.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the arrival of its "Never Settle: Reloaded" game bundle, the sequel to last year's monumental "Never Settle" bundle. "Never Settle: Reloaded" delivers by bundling up to four of this year's most anticipated PC games -- "BioShock Infinite" by 2K Games and Irrational Games, "Crysis 3" by Electronic Arts, "DmC Devil May Cry" by Capcom and "Tomb Raider" by Square Enix -- with select AMD Radeon HD 7900 and HD 7800 Series graphics cards. The bundle highlights the continued commitment by AMD to ensure an incredible gaming experience on the world's top PC titles optimized for AMD Radeon graphics cards

"AMD knows gaming and in 2013 we plan to make a huge mark on the industry. Today we begin that journey by showing the world that the best PC game developers are AMD Gaming Evolved partners," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics. "The 'Never Settle: Reloaded' bundle clearly stands apart from anything else in the market. Gaming has always been, and will remain, the core of the AMD Graphics strategy and success. In 2013, we plan to forge greater inroads into the gaming industry and it begins with packaging this year's biggest games with the best graphics hardware from AMD." The "Never Settle: Reloaded" bundle offers the following games when purchased with select AMD Radeon HD 7900 and HD 7800 Series graphics cards:

HIS gave its March-launched Radeon HD 7970 IceQ X² graphics card a design update, augmenting it with the newer Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition chip, featuring PowerTune with Boost. While the older IceQ X² shipped with 925/5500 MHz (core/memory), the new card ships with 1000 MHz core, 1050 MHz boost, and 6000 MHz memory. It packs 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide interface. The card retains its board and cooler designs, including the swanky IceQ X² heat-pipe fed dual-fan heatsink that doesn't need more than two expansion slots in your machine, and a back-plate. In all likelihood, the new card will be priced similar to the launch-price of the original, back in March (around US $450).

AMD announced what it calls the "Never Settle" driver, a version of Catalyst Software suite, which could potentially tilt the price-performance ratios in its favor, against NVIDIA. The new drivers carry the canonical version number 12.11, and target AMD Radeon 7000 series GPUs, specifically those based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture, such as HD 7750, HD 7770 GHz Ed., HD 7850, HD 7870 GHz Ed., HD 7950, HD 7950 BE, HD 7970, HD 7970 GHz Ed., and HD 7990; and mobile Radeon HD 7700M series, HD 7800M series, and HD 7900M series.

Catalyst 12.11 promises up to 15% performance improvements in the most modern games, such as Battlefield 3, DiRT Showdown, Sleeping Dogs, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and more. With these improvements, AMD is claiming performance leads for all its top products, over NVIDIA's. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, for example, gains 20% performance advantage over GeForce GTX 680; HD 7970 gains 15% over GTX 670, and HD 7950 20% over GTX 660 Ti. The Never Settle driver, along with its complete release notes and download links will be updated a little later today.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 12.11

MSI maintained the R7970 Lightning as its flagship AMD Radeon graphics card from March, even after AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition in June. The company finally decided to combine its R7970 Lightning board with the new "Tahiti XT2" Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ASIC, creating the R7970 Lightning Boost Edition (BE). While the original R7970 Lightning shipped with 1070 MHz core and 5.60 GHz memory, the new R7970 Lightning BE ships with 1070 MHz core, 1150 MHz PowerTune Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory (288 GB/s). It packs 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.

Most other features remain the same. The R7970 Lightning BE packs an enthusiast-grade 17-phase VRM, dual-BIOS, voltage-conditioning GPU Reactor module, and TwinFrozr IV cooling solution. Quite shockingly, MSI didn't take the opportunity to address the lack of dual-link DVI connectors in the original R7970 Lightning, the Lightning BE continues to have two single-link DVI, and four mini-DisplayPort connectors. The new R7970 Lightning BE could displace the original from its US $499.99 price-point.

ASUS finally announced its flagship AMD Radeon graphics card, the Matrix HD 7970 Platinum. The card basked in camera flashlight at this years biggest tech tradeshows, and is released to the market with the new Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ASIC, that includes PowerTune with Boost technology. Available in two variants, the base model (1000/1050/6600 MHz core/boost/memory), and Platinum (1050/1100/6600 MHz), the card uses a strong 20-phase VRM that draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The VRM features sophisticated load-line calibration features with manual LLC factor control (fine-tune protection against V-droop during voltage-sensitive overclocking sessions).

Apart from manual LLC factor tuning, the card features VGA Hotwire, clearly labeled points on its PCB that let you outfit it with manual voltage tuning circuitry. The card provides software voltage control via GPU Tweak, too, but is restricted to ~1.3V. The PCB features an LN2 mode switch, which loads an extreme cooling-optimized BIOS. A fan-override button shoots fan speed to 100% without software interference. Lastly, the card is cooled by a triple-slot ROG-styled DirectCU II cooler that covers most hot components, including the GPU, memory, and VRM. An additional LN2-optimized VRM heatsink is included in the package. Prices start at US $490.

With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 650 threatening to make things messy in the sub-$250 market, and competitive pricing between NVIDIA partners with high-end SKUs, AMD is preparing yet another round of price cuts to its Radeon HD 7000 GPU series. Its last round followed the launch of GeForce GTX 660 Ti. According to the source, this is what AMD's lineup could look like, when it's done resetting prices:

• Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition - starts at $430
• Radeon HD 7970 standard - starts at $410
• Radeon HD 7950 Boost - starts at $300
• Radeon HD 7950 standard - starts at $290
• Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition - starts at $240
• Radeon HD 7850 2 GB - starts at $200

SAPPHIRE Technology has now added two new Vapor-X Models to its HD 7970 series of high performance graphics cards based on the latest HD 7970 GHz Edition GPU from AMD.

The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 6GB Vapor-X Edition shares many of the features of the recently announced industry-leading TOXIC Edition. Its 6GB frame buffer makes it ideally suited to multi-screen gaming as well as providing the extra memory required for demanding professional applications such as content creation, video editing or rendering.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2012 of $1.41 billion, net income of $37 million, or $0.05 per share, and operating income of $77 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $46 million, or $0.06 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $86 million.

"Overall weakness in the global economy, softer consumer spending and lower channel demand for our desktop processors in China and Europe made the closing weeks of the quarter challenging," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "We are taking definitive steps to improve our performance and correct the issues within our control as we expect headwinds will continue in the third quarter as the industry sets a new baseline. We remain optimistic about our core businesses as well as future opportunities with our competitively differentiated next-generation Accelerated Processor Units (APUs). Our recently launched Trinity APU continues to gain traction with customers. We are committed to driving profitable growth."

The performance lead that MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning maintained over reference HD 7970 was cut down, first by NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680, and then by AMD's own Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, leaving its engineers to go back to the drawing boards, and design an even faster graphics card. The result: a liquid-cooled HD 7970 GHz Edition Lightning graphics card, which could push clock-speeds up even further. The card ships with a pre-installed full-coverage water-block, made by EK WaterBlocks (EKWB). It comes ready for 6-display Eyefinity, with four mini-DisplayPort and two DVI. Here's hoping one of those is a dual-link DVI. More details are awaited.

Update: We've received word that it's not that MSI has a new product in the works, but that EKWB has a water-block tailored for MSI's existing R7970 Lightning.

AMD is preparing a wave of price-cuts for Radeon HD 7800 series and HD 7900 series products, to make them competitive against NVIDIA's offerings, and to prepare for a new bunch of performance-segment GPUs from its competitor (such as the GTX 660). The new pricing looks like this:

• Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: US $499
• Radeon HD 7970: US $429
• Radeon HD 7950: US $349
• Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition: US $299
• Radeon HD 7850: US $249

The most significant set of price cuts concern HD 7950 and below, which are now more affordable in the price-performance "sweetspot" segment, which targets a bulk of PC gamers. The new prices will take effect later today.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 670 presents a big problem to AMD's Radeon HD 7900 series lineup. It clearly outperforms Radeon HD 7950, outperforms Radeon HD 7970 in most cases, and maintains a healthy cost-performance lead over Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, even if it lags behind in performance. To combat this, AMD is reportedly working on a new SKU, called Radeon HD 7950 GHz Edition.

The "new" Radeon HD 7950 GHz Edition will be priced competitively to the GeForce GTX 670 (around $350-400), will retain the core configuration of the original HD 7950, with 1,792 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 3 GB of memory; but will feature higher clock speeds, with a core clock speed ≥1.00 GHz, and could feature AMD PowerTune with Boost feature. It is also reported that a majority of HD 7950 GHz Edition graphics cards launched to the market (later this quarter), will be cost-effective non-reference designs by AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners.

Records are made to be broken, so shatter them with the new and unbelievably fast Club 3D Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. In March, Club 3D introduced the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition, With a reference engine clock of 1GHz, this represented an engineering milestone for the graphics card industry. With the new Radeon HD 7970 GHz, we are continuing to deliver on this high-performance pedigree.

How is the GHz Edition variant of the Radeon HD 7970 different? The Club 3D HD 7970 GHz Edition embodies the maturity of the 28nm process, and the scalability of the Graphics Core Next architecture. Due to both of these factors, the GHz variant raises the GPU core clockspeed from 925MHz to 1000MHz+. This card also features an extension to AMD Powertune technology called "Boost", which allows the GPU to dynamically adjust both voltage and clockspeed above the reference clock of 1GHz+.

Following the announcement by AMD of the availability of the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the latest product using its highly acclaimed Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, SAPPHIRE Technology, one of the World's leading manufacturers and a global supplier of graphics cards, is happy to announce that this latest generation of GPUs from AMD will form the basis of several cutting edge new models.

Within the next few weeks, SAPPHIRE will introduce the eagerly awaited TOXIC Edition and Vapor-X models in its HD 7970 family. The TOXIC Edition is a limited edition factory overclocked model - delivering best in class performance and targeted at the enthusiast. The Vapor-X models use SAPPHIRE's exclusive Vapour Chamber cooling technology to deliver optimised performance whilst retaining low noise and cool operation.

Today AMD launched the world's fastest graphics processing unit (GPU), the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition uses AMD's innovative Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture to deliver astonishing performance and breathtaking image quality, providing world-class gameplay at the highest resolutions in the most demanding games such as Battlefield 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and DiRT Showdown.

"The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition rounds out our award-winning GCN family, providing world-class gameplay thanks to the industry's fastest single GPU," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD. "Gamers have been hungry for our AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series since our launch last December. We have been able to meet that growing demand as we expanded our AMD Radeon HD 7000 offerings and brought the industry's most advanced graphics across a complete family of leading-edge desktop and notebook graphics cards."