Expanding their relationship beyond hardware, LucidLogix today announced that its' Virtu GPU virtualization software will be integrated into various SKUs of ASUS motherboards based on the Intel Z68 chipsets. Virtu allows the systems to simultaneously take full advantage of both the low-power best-in-class media processing features of the 2nd generation Intel Core processor graphics and the 3D gaming performance of add-in cards with graphics processing units (GPUs) from AMD and NVIDIA.

"Since ASUS supplies a third of the world's motherboards, their knowledge and expertise in the market magnifies the importance of a seamless media experience only provided by Lucid," said Offir Remez, president and founder of Lucid. "The Virtu solution is rapidly becoming a standard, must-have feature and its expanding market acceptance creates a runway for further innovation in both desktop and notebook PC graphics."

Club 3D B.V. announces the introduction of the Radeon HD 6750 CoolStream Edition video card based on the Juniper LE chipset, AMD' second generation DirectX 11. Club 3D has built a good reputation on silent cooled video cards with the award winning CoolStream series. This card is no exception, with speeds of 700 Mhz core and 4600 Mhz for the memory with a totally silent heatpipe cooler, it makes one of the fastest silent graphics card available today.

With the latest UVD hardware on board, it considerably reduces the CPU load delivering and decoding stunning Blu-Ray and H.264 content. HDMI has been upgrated to 1.4a for 3D content making it the perfect choice for a HTPC.

It could be curtains down for NVIDIA nForce SLI chipset for AMD platform, as the GPU giant formally announced its intentions to license NVIDIA SLI technology for use on AMD chipset-based motherboards starting from AMD's upcoming 9-series chipset. Rumors about this development started trickling in around late March. NVIDIA's public release confirms most of what was outlined in the leaked company slide in the older article, that licenses will be only offered to 9-series (and later) chipset-based motherboards, and that only those motherboard manufacturers that are licensed by NVIDIA for SLI on their Intel platform motherboards will be given licenses. NVIDIA specifically mentions ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI as qualifying partners.

The more interesting part of the release, however, was the box-art of ASUS' upcoming high-end socket AM3+ motherboard, the Republic of Gamers (ROG) Crosshair V Formula. Its salad of product logos is what is most fascinating. For one, it confirms the product name and logo of AMD's new high-end desktop processors to be "FX", as revealed by the box designs. The next logo is of Phenom II, and as we know, AM3+ gives backwards compatibility to older AM3 processors. Next up is the AMD 9-series chipset logo, another Radeon-like logo by AMD. Next to it is the logo of the moment: NVIDIA SLI, and lastly ATI CrossFireX. There is a newer rectangular logo of "AMD CrossFire" that succeeds the ATI CrossFireX logo, but maybe ASUS, like many, found it too hideous. You can probably make a better one on MS Paint.

ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and the world's largest channel manufacturer of graphics cards, motherboards and mini-PCs, today introduces the new FUSION-ITX WiFi A-series - a world-class mainboard that combines the power of AMD Radeon HD graphics processing with class-leading energy-efficiency for the ultimate flexible mini-ITX form factor.

The ZOTAC FUSION-ITX WiFi A-series features the AMD E-350 APU platform that incorporates a dual-core 1.6 GHz processor with Microsoft DirectX 11 compatible AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics for the ultimate synergy of CPU and GPU performance. The combination enables flawless high-definition Blu-ray and streaming Internet video playback capabilities for a visually rich computing experience in a mini-ITX platform.

Club 3D B.V. announces the introduction of the Radeon HD 6770 video card based on the Juniper XT chipset, AMD' second generation DirectX 11. The new Club 3D Radeon HD 6770 1 GB GDDR5 video card replaces the very successful HD 5770, the preferred choice by gamers, adding twice the horsepower (28.8 Gpixel/s vs 13.6 Gpixel/s) and incorporating new technologies already found in the 6K series.

The Radeon HD 6770 delivers stunning HD gaming and computing experience. Supporting HD3D which enables 3D gaming and experience Blu-ray 3D, AMD APP to accelerate everyday applications and multi-monitor displays, it makes a this card the ideal upgrade.

TODAY HIS launches the HIS 6770 & 6750 Fan 1GB GDDR5, delivering a stunning HD gaming and computing experience with complete DirectX 11 support and a broad array of advanced graphics, display and memory technologies.

Loaded with core speed at 700MHz and memory speed at 4,600MHz, the HIS 6750 transfers serious high-definition gaming frame rates. The HIS 6770 supplies the same 1GB GDDR5 but a higher core clock at 850MHz and memory clock at 4,800MHz, fulfilling the needs of our Power Gamers who desire an incredible gaming experience on the latest and most demanding titles.

MSI, the leading graphics card and motherboard manufacturer in the world, releases three new graphics cards based on the AMD Radeon HD6000 architecture: The R6770-MD1GD5, R6750-MD1GD5 and R6750-MD512D5. All of the new MSI R6700 series graphics cards support the latest version of MSI's exclusive Afterburner overclocking software with the Predator video capture function.

Gamers can enhance their usage experiences by capturing in-game videos and sharing them with friends over the web! MSI's latest R6700 graphics cards are equipped with 8cm PWM fan to offer better heat dissipation, and Military Class II concept components for extreme stability and durability2. MSI R6700 series adopt HDMI 1.4a connectivity for the latest in 3D video support, and 7.1 channel lossless high-quality TrueHD and DTS-HD sound.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today released advanced gaming video cards: the PowerColor HD6700 series. Compatible with all the latest technology, the PowerColor HD6700 series includes HD6770 and HD6750, enabling the immersive HD gaming experience like never before.

PowerColor HD6770 has 800 stream processors, clocks in at 850MHz core speed and 1200MHz of memory speed; easily boost up your gaming rig with 1.36 teraFLOPs of computing Power. The PowerColor HD6750 clocks at 700MHz core and 1000MHz memory, with 1GB GDDR5 onboard memory, delivering a faster speed and higher bandwidths to accelerate the PC and enhance the gaming performance.

SAPPHIRE Technology has just strengthened its current range of graphics cards with the introduction of several new models in the HD 6700 series aimed at users wanting to benefit from the latest features including multi-screen displays and stereoscopic 3D output.

Several models will be introduced in the HD 6700 series offering a choice of memory configurations and outputs. All of them feature DX 11 engines from AMD and on-board hardware video decoding with the AMD UVD (universal Video Decoder) supporting Blu-Ray 3D for stereoscopic 3D over HDMI 1.4a. They all support AMD APP Acceleration with Stream processing as well as AMD Eyefinity multi-screen technology. Eyefinity gives users the ability not only to play games on multiple monitors, but also to work across three or more monitors as though it were one large monitor, bringing huge productivity benefits to applications such as photo editing, music creation and document creation.

MD today announced a new collaboration with Multicoreware, a leader in software solutions and tool development for multi-core and heterogeneous computing environments, to deliver an advanced set of tools for OpenCL optimization. The tools development effort accelerates software developers' ability to create and optimize software that fully exploits the unique processing capability of AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

"Accelerated parallel processing represents unprecedented levels of computing capability in mobile form factors, and the tools suite that Multicoreware is developing enables application developers to achieve this performance benefit with less effort," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program. "Our work with Multicoreware marks another milestone toward broad industry adoption of OpenCL as we equip developers with necessary tools to build innovative, next-generation applications ranging from consumer PCs to high-performance computing."

AMD today released this month's timely release of its Catalyst software suite, a unified software package that installs the latest drivers for AMD Radeon graphics processors, AMD HDMI audio device, 7-series and 8-series chipsets, and related system software. This particular release has been touted by its makers within the community to provide significant performance improvements, some of which have been demonstrated by a "preview" version of Catalyst 11.4 released last month. A partial list of those games can be found here. Apart from performance enhancements, Catalyst 11.4 WHQL includes new features such as task based display management controls, an improved Eyefinity setup group, and a new Catalyst update notifier that lets your know if a newer version of AMD Catalyst is available online. There are some OpenCL GPU compute enhancements, and a list of bugs fixed, as listed in the Release Notes document.

DOWNLOAD:AMD Catalyst 11.4 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

Foxconn, the world leading manufacturer of computer components and systems, today announced incredible performance results for the new NT-A3500 Barebone - with over twice the performance of the NT-330i it replaces, whilst using significantly less power.

Utilising the new AMD Fusion APU with built-in Radeon HD 6310 graphics, the NT-A3500 is capable of delivering DirectX 11 graphics and true 1080p HD playback with real-time image processing, all in the ultra-small form factor of the Foxconn NT-series chassis.

AMD today announced a distinguished line-up of keynote speakers as well as technical session topics for the inaugural AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS), which will be held June 13-16, 2011 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington.

Industry keynote presentations will be delivered by esteemed industry experts from AMD, ARM and Microsoft. In his keynote "Heterogeneous Parallelism at Microsoft" Herb Sutter, Microsoft principal architect of Native Languages, will showcase upcoming innovations to bring access to increasingly heterogeneous compute resources directly into the world's most popular native languages.

ASRock launched a new marketing campaign for its AMD platform motherboards, claiming to be the first manufacturer to be out with motherboards that use real AM3+ sockets. AM3+ is the FCPGA socket that has been designed for upcoming AMD FX series "Zambezi" processors based on the "Bulldozer" architecture. As a part of its campaign, ASRock highlighted the benefits of opting for its AM3+ motherboards. In the process, it ended up disclosing quite some technical information about AM3+, and why AMD designed it in the first place, when apparently AM3 can run Zambezi with a BIOS update.

To begin with, ASRock started with the socket itself, showing that AM3+ sockets can be identified by "AM3b" written on the socket, and have wider pin-holes (0.51 mm vs. 0.45 mm of AM3). It is possible that future (retail?) versions of the CPU, if not the engineering samples doing rounds, could use packages with thicker pins that are incompatible with AM3. The thicker pins add durability, and are designed for a different set of electrical specifications.

NVIDIA is set to launch its next upper-mainstream GPU, the GeForce GTX 560 (not to be confused with GeForce GTX 560 Ti) on May 17. Designed to compete with AMD's Radeon HD 6790, the new GTX 560 is based on the same GPU as the GTX 560 Ti, the 40 nm GF114. It has 336 out of 384 CUDA cores enabled, while most other specifications of the GPU are untouched. The core clock speed is said to be not less than 800 MHz, making it faster than GeForce GTX 460, which otherwise has the same specifications while being based on the older GF104 silicon.

AMD today announced revenue for the first quarter of 2011 of $1.61 billion, net income of $510 million, or $0.68 per share, and operating income of $54 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $56 million, or $0.08 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $92 million.

"First quarter operating results were highlighted by strong demand for our first generation of AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs)," said Thomas Seifert, CFO and interim CEO. "APU unit shipments greatly exceeded our expectations, and we are excited to build on that momentum now that we are shipping our 'Llano' APU."

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today announces the first-to-market video card: the PowerColor HD 6850 single slot edition. The first available HD6850 single slot edition aims to fulfill the desire of performance and multi-function seekers when space is a premium.

The PowerColor HD 6850 single slot edition clocks in at 775MHz core speed and 1000MHz memory speed; accelerating gaming speed with 1.48 teraFLOPs of computing Power. The slim HD6850 can maximize the rig's performance in a single slot design, allowing a 4 way CrossFireX layout that delivers an out-of-box HD gaming experience like no other.

PowerColor is readying a new single-slot AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics card. The advantages of single-slot aside, the new card will also support 4-way CrossFireX. So now you can pack four of these cards into pooly-designed motherboards with adjacent PCI-E x16 slots, or you can sneak one into the slot that happens to be the bottom-most one. PowerColor's HD 6850 Single-Slot Edition uses a custom PCB design which is not much longer than the reference design, it uses a typical single-slot cooler design with tightly-packed aluminum fin air channels to which heat is fed by a copper plate. Air is flown through these channels by a blower.

Apart from 4-way CrossFireX capability, the PowerColor HD 6850 Single-Slot Edition uses nearly complete display connectivity, with one DVI, a full-size HDMI 1.4a, and two DisplayPort 1.2. Power is drawn in from a single 6-pin power connector. The card uses AMD reference clock speeds of 775 MHz core and 1000 MHz (4.00 GHz effective) memory. There's 1 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit wide memory interface onboard. Based on the 40 nm Barts GPU, HD 6850 features 960 stream processors, and full DirectX 11 compliance. More details and pictures are awaited of this intriguing new card.

Club 3D B.V. announces the introduction of the AMD Radeon HD 6670 video card based on the Turks XT chipset, AMD' second generation DirectX 11. The new Club 3D Radeon HD 6670 1 GB GDDR5 video card features now the AMD HD3D technology which allows you to have faster access to multimedia applications and gives you all tools to enhanced productivity.

Furthermore you can enjoy the latest 3D Blu-ray movies with EyeSpeed technology. The new card comes equipped with a nice single slot cooler which makes you enjoy your new video card without compromising on your perfect computing environment.

PC giant Acer is ready with a new uppish netbook, the Aspire One 722. This 11.6-inch nebook runs on AMD's Fusion C-50 accelerated processing unit (APU) clocked at 1.00 GHz, and embedding an AMD Radeon HD 6250 DirectX 11 compliant graphics processor. The 11.6-inch screen packs a decent resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. Most other features are identical to those of the Aspire One 522. The 722 feature an aquamarine color tone, with "drop ripple" design on its lid. Battery life is improved by an hour, now up to 7 hours on a full charge. Windows 7 Home Basic is the OS of choice. Price and availability details are not known.

Club 3D B.V. releases the new Radeon HD 6450 1GB DD3 Noiseless Edtition, the industry second generation of DirectX 11 capable graphics card.This new card features a heatsink cooler design aimed at the HTPCs users and with UVD3 (Universal Video Decoder), improved tessellation engine and higher clock speeds makes the perfect fit for users who are looking an entry level card that is affordable and packs a punch. Offering a low profile card customers can expect this card to be bundled with 2 Low Profile brackets like usually offered by Club 3D on Low Profile items.

MSI, the leading graphics card and motherboard manufacturer in the world, today announced the release of three new graphics cards based on the AMD Radeon HD6000 architecture: the R6670-MD1GD5, R6570-MD1GD3/LP, and R6450-MD1GD3/LP. All of the new MSI graphics cards in the AMD HD 6000 family support the latest version of MSI's proprietary Afterburner software with the Predator video capture function. Gamers can enhance their gaming experiences by capturing in-game videos and sharing them with friends over the web!

All of MSI's new AMD HD 6000 graphics cards are equipped with HDMI 1.4a connectivity for the latest in 3D video support, and 7.1 channel lossless high-quality TrueHD and DTS-HD sound. The latest visual effects standards such as DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 are also fully supported. The cards utilize Military Grade II components for extreme stability and durability. All in all, the new AMD HD6000 graphics cards offered by MSI provide the most fun and highest quality, qualifying it as the best choice on the market.

ASUS has released the ASUS HD 6670, HD 6570 and HD 6450 graphics cards that offer users superb performance for vivid graphics. All three contain the latest DirectX 11 technology to support ultra- realistic game characters, enhanced speed, and true-to-life special effects. AMD supported App Acceleration accelerates everyday work applications while the HD 6670 and HD 6570 deliver a smooth, high quality 3D video playback experience.

The HD 6670 and HD 6570 are clocked at 810MHz and 650MHz respectively, and both are built with the latest in ASUS advancements for a refined visual experience. ASUS exclusive Super Alloy Power applies special-formulated components to provide an efficient power supply for a 15% performance boost, 35°C cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan. A unique dust-proof fan design dissipates heat efficiently and extends the graphic card's lifespan by 25% (10,000 hours) through increased dust and particle resistance. Native HDMI, Dual-link DVI and Display Port connections on the EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 allow users to experience AMD Eyefinity, which can extend the visual horizon across three displays for engaging HD entertainment.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today introduces the graphics for causal gaming and advanced home entertainment: the PowerColor HD6670, HD6570 and HD6450. The latest announced series enhance the home entertainment experience within 75 watts consumed, enabling gamers to be environmentally friendly enjoy the HD gaming experience.

The HD6670 clocks in at 800MHz core speed and 1000MHz memory speed, it's a great mix of performance, price and power. The HD6570 delivers a playable gaming performance which has core speed at 650MHz and memory speed at 1000MHz. And the HD6450 provides the stellar entertaining experience, clocks in at 625MHz and 667MHz of GPU and memory speeds respectively.

SAPPHIRE Technology has just strengthened its range of graphics cards based on the latest graphics technology from AMD with the introduction of several new models in the HD 6000 series aimed at entry level and mainstream users wanting to benefit from the latest features including multi-screen displays and stereoscopic 3D output.

Several models will be introduced with the latest core graphics technology and offering a choice of memory configurations and outputs. All of them feature second generation DX 11 engines from AMD and on-board hardware video decoding with the AMD UVD (universal Video Decoder) - now in its third generation supporting Blu-Ray 3D for stereoscopic 3D over HDMI 1.4a. In addition, models with DisplayPort output also support Eyefinity multi-screen technology. Eyefinity gives users the ability not only to play games on multiple monitors, but also to work across three or more monitors as though it were one large monitor, bringing huge productivity benefits to applications such as photo editing, music creation and document creation.