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."

NVIDIA today announced that Microsoft will offer NVIDIA GPU-enabled professional graphics applications and accelerated computing capabilities to customers worldwide through its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. Deploying the latest version of NVIDIA GRID in its new N-Series virtual machine offering, Azure is the first cloud computing platform to provide NVIDIA GRID 2.0 virtualized graphics for enterprise customers.

For the first time, businesses will have the ability to deploy NVIDIA Quadro-grade professional graphics applications and accelerated computing on-premises, in the cloud through Azure, or via a hybrid of the two using both Windows and Linux virtual machines. Azure will also offer customers supercomputing-class performance, with the addition of the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform's flagship Tesla K80 GPU accelerators, for the most computationally demanding data center and high performance computing (HPC) applications.

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."

It turns out that AMD's new "Fiji" silicon lacks HDMI 2.0 support, after all. Commenting on OCUK Forums, an AMD representative confirmed that the chip lacks support for the connector standard, implying that it's limited to HDMI 1.4a. HDMI 2.0 offers sufficient bandwidth for 4K Ultra HD resolution at 60 Hz. While the chip's other connectivity option, DisplayPort 1.2a supports 4K at 60 Hz - as do every 4K Ultra HD monitor ever launched - the lack of HDMI 2.0 support hurts the chip's living room ambitions, particularly with products such as the Radeon R9 Nano, which AMD CEO Lisa Su, stated that is being designed for the living room. You wouldn't need a GPU this powerful for 1080p TVs (a GTX 960 or R9 270X ITX card will do just fine), and if it's being designed for 4K UHD TVs, then its HDMI interface will cap visuals at a console-rivaling 30 Hz.

In the latest picture leaked of AMD's upcoming flagship graphics card, codenamed "Fiji-XT," we get a final confirmation of the reference-design card's length, particularly its short PCB. Since this card uses a factory-fitted AIO liquid cooling solution, and since the Fiji XT package is effectively smaller than that of Hawaii, with the surrounding memory chips gone (moved to the GPU package as HBM stacks), the PCB is extremely compact, with just the GPU package, and its VRM. Speaking of which, the card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The coolant tubes stick out from the rear of the card, making their way to a 120 x 120 mm radiator, with a single included 120 mm PWM fan. With this card, AMD is doing away with DVI altogether. Connectors will be a mixture of DisplayPort 1.2a and HDMI 2.0.

NVIDIA announced the first WHQL-signed driver for Windows 10. GeForce 352.84 WHQL offers full compliance to WDDM 2.0 specification, and offers support for DirectX 12 (feature level 12_0) on supported GPUs (all chips based on the "Kepler" and "Maxwell" architectures). There are no games that take advantage of DirectX 12 right now, but NVIDIA suggested a few tech-demos you can toy with, such as Forza DX12 renderer, Fable Legends DX12 Game Demo, Witch Chapter 0 DX12 SLI_support, King of Wushu DX12, and the Unreal Engine Race DX12 demo. DirectX 12 is highly anticipated among game developers, as it provides a leap in performance due to the way it handles multi-CPU. For the first time, 3D graphics rendering can take advantage of any number of CPU cores you throw at them, allowing game developers to increase eye-candy and detail. DirectX 12 will debut with Windows 10, which launches this July.DOWNLOAD: GeForce 352.84 WHQL for Windows 10 Desktop GPUs | Notebook GPUs

Earlier this day, HP announced its newest line of desktop PCs, one of which comes with a curious-sounding Radeon R9 380 graphics card. HP's product pages for its new desktops aren't active, yet, leaving us to only speculate on what the R9 380 could be. One theory making rounds says that the R9 380 could either be a re-branded R9 285, or be based on its "Tonga" silicon, which physically features 2,048 stream processors based on Graphics CoreNext (GCN) 1.2 architecture, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. Another theory states that the R9 380 could be an OEM-only re-brand of the R9 280 or R9 280X, based on the 3+ year old "Tahiti" silicon.

The former theory sounds more plausible, because re-branding a "Tahiti" based product would be suicidal for AMD. Although based on GCN, "Tahiti" lacks a lot of architecture features introduced with "Hawaii" and "Tonga." AMD practically stopped optimizing games for "Tahiti," and some of its new features, such as FreeSync and XDMA CrossFire, can't be implemented on it. "Tonga," on the other hand, supports both these features, and one can create an SKU with all its 2,048 stream processors, and its full 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface unlocked. If the R9 380 is indeed an OEM-only product, then it's likely that the company's retail-channel products could be branded in the succeeding R9 400 series. GPU makers tend to re-brand and bump their SKUs by a series for OEMs to peddle in their "new" products at short notice.

After Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 game engines went "free,"with their source-codes put up by their makes for anyone to inspect freely, NVIDIA decided to join the bandwagon of showering game developers with technical empowerment, by putting up the entire source-code of PhysX 3.3.3, including its cloth and destruction physics code, on GitHub. The move to put up free-code of PhysX appears to be linked to the liberation of Unreal Engine 4 code.

NVIDIA PhysX is the principal physics component of Unreal-driven game titles for several years now. There's a catch, though. NVIDIA is only freeing CPU-based implementation of PhysX, and not its GPU-accelerated one, which leverages NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA GPU compute technology. There should still be plenty for game devs and students in the field, to chew on. In another interesting development, the PhysX SDK has been expanded from its traditionally Windows roots to cover more platforms, namely OS X, Linux, and Android. Find instructions on how to get your hands on the code, at the source link.

AMD today announced that Panasonic selected AMD FirePro M5100 mobile professional graphics to provide users on-the-move with quality, performance and innovation in a variety of work environments in the new Panasonic Toughbook CF-541. The Panasonic Toughbook CF-54 with AMD FirePro mobile professional graphics is designed to deliver outstanding graphics performance matched with world-class reliability for professionals in the automotive, telecommunications, construction, manufacturing, mining and defense industries or for professionals that require a portable workstation solution designed for a semi-harsh indoor or outdoor environment.

Panasonic Toughbook is legendary for its ruggedness and is widely known for its reliability and durability, even in extreme operating conditions. The inclusion of AMD FirePro mobile professional graphics creates a bold new category for architects, project managers and engineers who demand the ultimate combination of durability, reliability and workstation-class performance with certified application support.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) today published the Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) Standard version 1.4a. Replacing eDP v1.4, published in February 2013, eDP 1.4a enables a higher video data transfer rate for increased panel resolution, greater color depth and higher refresh rates. It also incorporates the VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC) Standard v1.1, and includes a new segmented panel architecture that enables higher panel integration. These and other refinements were made to the eDP 1.4a standard to take advantage of higher GPU video performance and newer display technologies, while also enabling reduced system power and form factor.

The eDP v1.4a standard leverages the VESA DisplayPort (DP) Standard v1.3, published in September 2014, as a base specification. That standard's new higher HBR3 link rate, which operates at 8.1 Gbps per lane, is now also part of eDP v1.4a. With both HBR3 and the DSC v1.1 standard included, the latest eDP standard can support embedded panels with up to 8K resolution. For embedded display applications, DSC is most often used to decrease video interface data rate or wire count, as well as reduce display frame buffer size, thereby reducing system power usage to extend battery life. It also enables reductions in system complexity and form factor.

Intel released a new driver with support for Intel 5th Generation Intel Core processors with HD Graphics 5500, HD Graphics 6000, and Iris Graphics 6100 and key enhancements for Intel 4th Generation Intel Core Processors. Benefits of updating to this driver include addition of partial hardware acceleration for the VP9 video format (for Chrome video playback, Google Hangouts), GPU accelerated decode of HEVC video format (for 4K Ultra HD video playback) and expanded Open CL and Open GL extension support.

This new driver is timed with the newly released 5th Generation Intel Core processor which has up to 34% faster 3D graphics, faster CPU performance, up to 50% better faster video conversion, and more than 1.5 hours longer battery life compared to previous generation.

DOWNLOAD: Intel Graphics Drivers 15.36 for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

Thermaltake, being an industry leader in computer chassis, thermal solutions, and power supply units, launches the latest power supply units from new "Toughpower" line. Rated between 650W to 1200W, Thermaltake's new Toughpower Grand Series Platinum (650W, 750W, 850W, 1050W and 1200W) is a high-end PC power supply unit with a fully modular design. The grandiose look with a classy black finish makes a clear statement through its sheer appearance.

The series is 80 PLUS Platinum-certified, so users not only get a guaranteed eco-friendly PSU but also superior performance with easy cable routing and increased airflow. The Toughpower Grand Platinum models are ideally suited for high-end gaming and enthusiast PCs powering multi-core processors in combination with multi-GPU setup.

Transporting the world closer to a future of auto-piloted cars that see and detect the world around them, NVIDIA today introduced NVIDIA DRIVE automotive computers -- equipped with powerful capabilities for computer vision, deep learning and advanced cockpit visualization. NVIDIA will offer two car computers: NVIDIA DRIVE PX, for developing auto-pilot capabilities, and NVIDIA DRIVE CX, for creating the most advanced digital cockpit systems. These automotive-grade in-vehicle computers are based on the same architecture used in today's most powerful supercomputers.

"Mobile supercomputing will be central to tomorrow's car," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder, NVIDIA. "With vast arrays of cameras and displays, cars of the future will see and increasingly understand their surroundings. Whether finding their way back to you from a parking spot or using situational awareness to keep out of harm's way, future cars will do many amazing, seemingly intelligent things. Advances in computer vision, deep learning and graphics have finally put this dream within reach.

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co. Ltd., a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards announced today the new X99M-Gaming 5, a mATX addition to its X99 lineup based on the Intel X99 chipset with support for the new Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition (Haswell-E) processor and latest DDR4 memory support.

With the GIGABYTE X99M-Gaming 5 motherboard, the ultimate gaming station does not have to be bulky and expensive. With a compact, yet feature rich design, the X99M-Gaming 5 is an affordable solution packed with high-end features including GIGABYTE AMP-UP audio technologies, onboard SATA-Express and M.2 ports for fast data transfers, and a Killer gigabit Lan port from Qualcomm Atheros for better online gaming performance.

AMD today announced that qualifying purchases from participating retailers of an AMD Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X or R9 290 graphics card will be eligible for a complimentary copy of 2K's Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.

"I personally have enjoyed more than 500 hours of game time with the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise, and I'm thrilled by what AMD and Firaxis Games have done with the Mantle graphics API to make Beyond Earth a smooth, high-performance marvel," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, ISV/IHV Partner Group, AMD. "AMD believes that gamers should freely experience that remarkable development work, and our new Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth promotion offers exactly that as a 'thank you' to new AMD Radeon customers."

GIGABYTE Technology, a leading creator of high performance server hardware, is happy to announce today the release of its G210-H4G. Developed in partnership with Carri Systems, a French specialist of GPU computing & HPC solutions, this product is a 2U rackmount housing 4 blades capable of receiving one NVIDIA GRID, Tesla or AMD FirePro card each.

In the context of an unfolding GPU virtualization market and the vast amount of new possibilities that it opens, the G210-H4G is an elegant solution designed with simplicity and flexibility in mind to let organizations, big and small, enjoy the benefits of this fast-growing computing trend.

NVIDIA today announced that it has filed complaints against Samsung and Qualcomm at the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, alleging that the companies are both infringing NVIDIA GPU patents covering technology including programmable shading, unified shaders and multithreaded parallel processing.

The identified Samsung products include the Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4 mobile phones; and the Galaxy Tab S, Galaxy Note Pro and Galaxy Tab 2 computer tablets. Most of these devices incorporate Qualcomm mobile processors -- including the Snapdragon S4, 400, 600, 800, 801 and 805. Others are powered by Samsung Exynos mobile chips, which incorporate ARM's Mali and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR GPU cores.

NVIDIA today announced that multiple server vendors are leveraging the performance of NVIDIA GPU accelerators to launch the world's first 64-bit ARM development systems for high performance computing (HPC).

ARM64 server processors were primarily designed for micro-servers and web servers because of their extreme energy efficiency. Now, they can tackle HPC-class workloads when paired with GPU accelerators using the NVIDIA CUDA 6.5 parallel programming platform, which supports 64-bit ARM processors.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers' market share for 2014 1Q.

JPR's AIB Report tracks computer add-in graphics boards, which carry discrete graphics chips. AIBs are used in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They are sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or are factory installed. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry using discrete chips and private high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for 2014 1Q. For the previous three quarters, the PC graphics market has gone up. This was the first quarter to show a decrease in shipments since last. Shipments were down 11.6% quarter-to-quarter, and down 4% compared to the same quarter last year.

Quick highlights:

• AMD's overall unit shipments decreased 18.2% quarter-to-quarter, Intel's total shipments decreased 7.9% from last quarter, and Nvidia's decreased 10.4%.
• The attach rate of GPUs to PCs for the quarter was 135% and 33% of PCs had discrete GPUs, which means 67% of the PCs are using the embedded graphics in the CPU.
• The overall PC market decreased 9% quarter-to-quarter, and decreased 3.5% year-to-year.

Dell cloud client-computing today at Citrix Synergy 2014 announced additions to its industry-leading cloud client portfolio with the Dell Wyse 5000 series all-in-one thin client, the Dell Wyse quad display 7000 series thin client and the Dell Wyse Xenith 3 zero client for Citrix. Dell also announced a new version of its end-to-end VDI offering, Dell Wyse Datacenter for Citrix XenDesktop, which accelerates deployment time and improves manageability with the addition of Dell Foglight for infrastructure monitoring.

"More than 200 million people interact with Dell Wyse solutions every day-from ATMs to kiosks to classrooms to hospitals. We continue to raise the bar for thin client manageability, security, performance and value, as well as lead the way with innovative form factors and OS support," said Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager, cloud client computing, Dell. "When these new portfolio additions are combined with Dell's data center infrastructure solutions for Citrix, customers from a broad range of industries can improve security, better protect their content, and sharply reduce ongoing costs - all while delivering the computing experiences their people demand."

AMD today announced its ongoing collaboration with Adobe has yielded numerous performance optimizations for new creative functions and workflow enhancements that will be available soon to video professionals using Adobe Creative Cloud. This latest wave of features includes high performance debayering for RED camera R3D media files, enhanced performance for new masking features, a new time-saving master clip capability and other tools.

Today's announcement builds on the already impressive additions the companies have made available in recent months, which began with OpenCL support through the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine to speed up Adobe Premiere Pro CC workflows. AMD App Acceleration via the open standard OpenCL API brings the massive parallel compute power of AMD A-Series APUs, AMD Radeon graphics, and AMD FirePro professional graphics to bear on the sophisticated capabilities within Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Adobe SpeedGrade CC, and Adobe Media Encoder CC. That performance also scales with AMD dual-GPU configurations, including dual AMD FirePro GPUs for the latest generation Apple Mac Pro systems.

NVIDIA today announced that it plans to integrate a high-speed interconnect, called NVIDIA NVLink, into its future GPUs, enabling GPUs and CPUs to share data five to 12 times faster than they can today. This will eliminate a longstanding bottleneck and help pave the way for a new generation of exascale supercomputers that are 50-100 times faster than today's most powerful systems.

NVIDIA will add NVLink technology into its Pascal GPU architecture -- expected to be introduced in 2016 -- following this year's new NVIDIA Maxwell compute architecture. The new interconnect was co-developed with IBM, which is incorporating it in future versions of its POWER CPUs.

Splashtop Inc., the worldwide leader in cross-device computing, announced optimization of Splashtop Streamer on select AMD discrete GPUs and APUs. Users can now enjoy remote HD video streaming, 3D professional graphics, and gaming experience, with super low latency.

"Splashtop turns every PC with AMD APU or GPU into fully interactive, remote gaming engine, streaming 3D games to any mobile device," said Mark Lee, CEO and co-founder of Splashtop, "Businesses, designers, doctors, or financial analysts can now get remote access to professional 3D apps and data, anytime, anywhere."