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)

NVIDIA's next-generation GPU architecture, codenamed "Maxwell," will debut this February, with the unexpectedly positioned GeForce GTX 750. The card will launch on February 18, to be specific. Maxwell will introduce a host of new features for NVIDIA, beginning with Unified Virtual Memory. The feature lets the GPU and CPU share the same memory. Such a feature is already implemented on the current CUDA, but Maxwell could be designed to reduce overhead involved in getting the thing to work. The next big feature is that Maxwell GPUs will embed a 64-bit ARM CPU core based on NVIDIA's "Project Denver." This CPU core will allow the GPU to reduce dependency on the system's main processor in certain GPGPU scenarios. Pole-vaulting the CPU's authority in certain scenarios could work to improve performance

Getting back to the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, NVIDIA's aim is simple, to see how "Maxwell" performs on the existing, proven 28 nanometer silicon fab process, before scaling it up on the future 20 nm nodes, with bigger chips. Given its name, we expect it to be positioned in between the GTX 760 and the GTX 660 in terms of gaming performance, but we won't be surprised if it falls into an entirely different league with GPGPU. There are no specifications at hand.

AMD announced its 2014 A-Series APU for the desktop platform, code-named "Kaveri," after the southern-Indian river. Built in the new FM2+ package, the APUs run only on socket FM2+ motherboards based on the AMD A88X, A78, and A55 chipsets; while the socket itself can seat older FM2 APU families, "Trinity" and "Richland." In many ways, the socket transition is similar to that of socket AM3+. "Kaveri" sees AMD integrate two of its newest CPU and GPU micro-architectures, "Steamroller" for CPU, and Graphics CoreNext 2.0 for the GPU. "Kaveri" is also built on newer generation 28 nm silicon fab process.

"Steamroller" is an evolution of the same modular CPU core design as its predecessors, "Piledriver" and "Bulldozer." AMD promises a 10 percent improvement in performance clock-by-clock, per core, which falls in line with AMD's normal scheme of annual incremental performance updates on its CPU micro-architectures. A "Steamroller" module is a combination of two 64-bit x86 cores, which feature dedicated and shared components. "Kaveri" has two such modules, and so physically, it features a quad-core CPU.

Price wars between GPU makers are something to look forward to each year, as that's typically when you get the best bang for your buck. Such an optimal time to buy new graphics cards usually comes when both AMD and NVIDIA have launched a new graphics card lineup, each. AMD tends to launch its lineup first, followed by NVIDIA, which then begins a cycle of proactive and reactive price-cuts between the two, which churns up the $300 price-performance sweet-spot so well, that a purchase from that segment usually sets your PC up for the following three years. 2013-14 saw a major disruption to this cycle, Litecoin mining. Litecoin miners will hurt more than help brand AMD Radeon, here's why.

AMD today announced the new AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition graphics card, designed for big data high-performance computing (HPC) workloads for single precision and double precision performance. With full support for PCI Express 3.0 and optimized for use with the OpenCL compute programming language, the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition GPU features ECC memory plus DirectGMA support allowing developers working with large models and assemblies to take advantage of the massively parallel processing capabilities of AMD GPUs based on the latest AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition GPU is slated for availability in Spring 2014.

Although NVIDIA's Tegra line of SoCs are among the best performing there are on the market; the high-end SoC market is dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung. These chips are built from scratch by the companies, but the underlying CPU and GPU architectures are licensed from ARM, and the likes of Imagination Technologies, respectively. Imagination's PowerVR graphics cores make up over 80 percent of the embedded GPU market-share. There's a big change of plans at NVIDIA. The company is beginning to think that its expertise in GPU is better proliferated in the mobile SoC space not by waiting for Tegra to gain a foothold, but by licencing its GPU IP (intellectual property) to whoever is willing pay up, much in the same way ARM and Imagination do.

NVIDIA spokesperson David Shannon, in a recent blog post, wrote: "our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market... We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers."

Get to the next level with the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition. This card delivers truly game-changing performance that taps into the powerful new GeForce architecture to redefine smooth, seamless, lifelike gaming. It offers brand new, never before seen features that will redefine the way you think about performance graphics cards. Expect more from your graphics card than just state-of-the-art features and technology; get faster, smoother and a richer gaming experience with the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition.

GIGABYTE is proud to announce two new models of workstation motherboards and one new model dedicated to mission critical server applications. All of them being based on the Intel Xeon processors E5-2600 product family, these new models are designed to answer demanding needs for computing resources across various usage models, form factors and scales. While these products have been naturally thought for scenarios requiring heavy computing power through GPUs or GPGPU / co-processors cards, from CAD/CAE to rendering, simulation and modeling, their most notable advantage relies in their unique memory performance capability. GIGABYTE motherboards support DDR3-1600 MHz speeds with 16 GB 1.35V RDIMMs.

Achieved through GIGABYTE's capabilities in design, PCB layout and BIOS fine-tuning, this feature will be most appreciated in the many workstation applications where improvements in memory frequency result in speeding up the user's productivity and in all the industries relying on server applications where each incremental improvement in memory performance results in significant benefits, such as in finance.

Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP), a leading provider of 2D/3D graphics Intellectual Property (IP) cores, today announced it has become a new member and contributor to the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation. HSA aims to push standards based architecture and interfaces for common computing use cases between CPU and GPU, enabling more effective hardware accelerated performance and power consumption on next generation compute platforms.

By supporting the HSA Foundation initiative, DMP wants to accelerate and simplify application development for mobile GPGPU platforms. The benefits of heterogeneous architectures and computing will allow smooth user experience for computer vision, image processing and graphics intensive applications on small consumer devices.

NVIDIA today made available the NVIDIA CUDA 5 production release, a powerful new version of the world's most pervasive parallel computing platform and programming model for accelerating scientific and engineering applications on GPUs. It can be downloaded for free from the NVIDIA Developer Zone website.

With more than 1.5 million downloads, supporting more than 180 leading engineering, scientific and commercial applications, the CUDA programming model is the most popular way for developers to take advantage of GPU-accelerated computing.

Club 3D presents today its latest addition to the Radeon HD 7000 series, the Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3 and 1GB DDR3 graphic cards. The Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3 offers an incredible amount of frame buffer for those budget minded gamers.

Both cards utilize a custom cooler design with a single slot 50mm fan that ensures the card to remain cool at 57 ⁰C on average when gaming, extending the lifespan of the card and operate stable at high speed. The HD 7750 4GB also consumes 3W less power under load and is fully powered through the PCI Express interface, meaning it does not require an external power connector, offering more compatibility with older generation power supplies. Run games at full HD by upgrading from your old onboard graphic card and boost performance by up to 7x compared to previous generation Radeon graphic cards. Add more and faster memory and enhance your internet experience, watching online video's, photo and video editing has never been this smooth and fast, experience true speed with the Club 3D Radeon HD 7750 4GB DDR3.

Today AMD launched the AMD FirePro A300 Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) for entry-level and mainstream desktop workstations. Featuring AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology, the new AMD FirePro A300 Series APUs are designed for users who demand a high-performance computing platform to power their computer-aided design, and media and entertainment (M&E) workflows. The new AMD FirePro A300 Series APUs combine industry-certified performance and reliability for professional applications with world-class 24-hour customer support, delivering highly-tuned performance and robust feature support across a range of professional applications and tools.

PLX Technology, Inc., a leading global supplier of high-speed connectivity solutions enabling emerging data center architectures, today announced a new trio of ultra-high lane count PCI Express (PCIe) Gen3 switches developed for cutting-edge markets like storage systems, high-end graphics, and communications platforms. The high-performance ExpressLane PCIe Gen3 switches include the PEX8796 (96 lanes, 24 ports), PEX8780 (80 lanes, 20 ports) and PEX8764 (64 lanes, 16 ports), which expand the PLX portfolio to 14 PCIe Gen3 devices. Designers choosing the PEX8796 switch -- touting bandwidth of 8 Gigatransfers per second, per lane, in full duplex mode -- are rewarded with amazing throughput of 1,536 gigabits per second (192 gigabytes/s), delivering performance that challenges all other interconnect technologies.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer and subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., announces its fully array of platforms supporting the Intel Xeon processor E5-4600/2600/2400 and E3-1200 v2 product families. This rich product portfolio offers various selections to server markets ranging from economic single-socket (Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v2 product family-based), entry level dual-socket (Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 product family-based), mainstream dual-socket (Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based) and high density quad-socket (Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product family-based) products. TYAN's rich product lines accelerate customers migrating to Intel's latest platforms with enhanced performance, reduced total cost of ownership and greater flexibility.

MEN Micro Inc., a world-renowned provider of embedded computing and I/O solutions for mission-critical industrial, mobile and harsh environment applications, now offers the G214, a 3U CompactPCI Serial multi-display controller board based on the latest AMD Radeon processor architecture.

The new peripheral board is ideal for use for video surveillance in control rooms as well as in simulators, professional A/V equipment and digital signage applications and other embedded applications requiring compute-intensive GPGPUs (general purpose graphics processing units).

OCZ Technology Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:OCZ), a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, is pleased to announce the Deneva 2 Series SSDs will be used as the storage device of choice in a pending 'Data-Scope' research project at The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) to create servers for scientific data processing. This initiative to maximize data processing power is spearheaded by Dr. Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor in the university's Department of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the JHU Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science.

With the goal of creating an affordable, powerful computational environment that can be used as a blueprint for future science applications, the JHU project comprises a system of nearly one hundred servers using hundreds of OCZ Deneva 2 SSDs combined with regular hard disk drives with two tiers for storage and computing. These powerful yet inexpensive systems also serve to expose students and researchers to leading-edge technology at an early stage.

TYAN has launched 8 cutting-edge platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These platforms are designed to deliver the benefits of Intel's latest processor architecture. We offer high peak performance along with outstanding power efficiency and are designed for today's HPC/GPU and general server applications. These products help channel customers build solutions for applications ranging from the largest data centers all the way down to the smallest server room implementations in a quick and efficient way.

Here are some key bits of information concerning the upcoming GeForce GTX 680, a performance single-GPU graphics card based on the 28 nm GK104 GPU by NVIDIA. The information, at face value, is credible, because we're hearing that a large contingent of the media that finds interest in the GPU industry, is attending the Game Developers Conference, where it could interact with NVIDIA, on the sidelines. The source, however, is citing people it spoke to at CeBIT.

First, and most interesting: with some models of the GeForce 600, NVIDIA will introduce a load-based clock speed-boost feature (think: Intel Turbo Boost), which steps up clock speeds of the graphics card when subjected to heavy loads. If there's a particularly stressing 3D scene for the GPU to render, it overclocks itself, and sees the scene through. This ensures higher minimum and average frame-rates.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer and subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., announces 8 cutting-edge platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These platforms are designed to deliver the benefits of Intel's latest processor architecture. They offer high peak performance along with outstanding power efficiency and are designed for today's HPC/GPU and general server applications. These products help channel customers build solutions for applications ranging from the largest data centers all the way down to the smallest server room implementations in a quick and efficient way.

TYAN's full array of 8 Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based platforms help users build systems that both increase IT capacity and reduce the total IT cost of ownership. TYAN's Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based platform portfolio includes 5 motherboards and 3 barebones systems that meet demands ranging from general small business computing to mission-critical applications such as virtualization or GPGPU. TYAN motherboards such as the S7050, S7055, or S7056, and barebones servers such as the GN70-B7056, FT48-B7055 and FT77-B7059, help customers address mission critical and massive workload requirements found in GPGPU and HPC applications. For memory intensive applications such as virtualization, TYAN presents the S7052 motherboard with a total of 24 DIMM slots. The S7053 is an excellent choice for applications requiring multiple expansion slots such as embedded and automation.

Hiroshige Goto, contributor for PC Watch that is known for detailed schematics of dies estimated the layout of Ivy Bridge silicon. Ivy Bridge is Intel's brand new multi-core processor silicon built on its new 22 nanometer silicon fabrication process. The four core silicon, which four configurations can be carved, will be built into packages that are pin-compatible with today's Sandy Bridge processors. The die area of Ivy Bridge is 160 mm², it has a total transistor count of 1.48 billion, compared to the Sandy Bridge silicon, which has 1.16 billion transistors crammed into a die 216 mm² in area, built on the 32 nm process.

Ivy Bridge has essentially the same layout as Sandy Bridge. The central portion of the die has four x86-64 cores with 256 KB dedicated L2 cache each, and a shared 8 MB L3 cache, while either sides of the central portion has the system agent and the graphics core. All components are bound by a ring-bus, that transports tagged data between the four CPU cores, the graphics core, the L3 cache, and the system agent, which has interfaces for the dual-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller, the PCI-Express controller, and the DMI chipset bus.

Some time in 2013, Intel will launch its new processor architecture, codenamed "Haswell", which will go on to succeed "Ivy Bridge". More than an year away from its market entry, Haswell has already been exhaustively documented, but not many got into the details about its embedded graphics processor. That is, until now. A new internal slide sourced by DonanimHaber details the integrated GPU (iGPU), it appears like Intel has solid plans for home users.

To begin with, Haswell's iGPU will be DirectX 11.1 compliant, which means it will take advantage of API optimizations that improve performance, for typical desktop usage scenarios. Apart from support for a new DirectCompute architecture, it will also support OpenCL 1.2, which speeds up certain GPGPU-optimized applications. More importantly, the iGPU will be designed around a new stereoscopic 3D standard called Auto-Stereoscopic 3D (AS3D), which will take the likes of Blu-ray 3D acceleration, stereo 3D photos, etc., to the masses. Currently, it takes at least an entry-level GeForce or Radeon GPU to for acceptable performance with stereo 3D.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units (GPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) on a single chip to collaborate - boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent.

"Chip manufacturers are now creating processors that have a 'fused architecture,' meaning that they include CPUs and GPUs on a single chip," says Dr. Huiyang Zhou, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who co-authored a paper on the research. "This approach decreases manufacturing costs and makes computers more energy efficient. However, the CPU cores and GPU cores still work almost exclusively on separate functions. They rarely collaborate to execute any given program, so they aren't as efficient as they could be. That's the issue we're trying to resolve."

Remember PowerVR GPUs which last saw light when GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 were around? The company behind it, Imagination Technologies, is working on a discrete PCI-Express GPGPU card for workstations targeting the media industry, which provides real-time ray-tracing acceleration. After its exile from PC graphics, Imagination Technologies worked on and achieved prevalence in embedded GPUs, GPUs embedded into ARM System-on-chips (SoCs), found in smartphones and tablets. This kept its GPU IP and R&D more than afloat.

In 2011, the company acquired Caustic Graphics, a smaller and much newer startup, which was working on dedicated ray-tracing accelerators, and had come up with a working FCPGA chip. Together the company is in the final stages of preparing a product that will bring Imagination Technologies back to the PC, only this time as a GPGPU (such as NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FireStream), and not a display-GPU. The product will be backed by OpenRL Brazil 3.0 SDK. This product will launch some time in 2012.

"Trinity" is the codename of AMD's next-generation performance accelerated processing unit (APU) family. Based on the new socket FM2 package, these chips will take advantage of AMD's next-generation Piledriver processor core architecture and VLIW4 GPU stream processor architecture. Together, Trinity promises increased general, visual, and parallel compute performance. Some of the slides detailing AMD's own performance estimates were put up by DonanimHaber in their recent video bulletin. We screen-grabbed the performance graphs from the low-resolution video, hence the grainy images.

To begin with, AMD is promising noticeable performance improvements over the current "Llano" APU. It spread its benchmarks across three categories: visual performance (using 3DMark Vantage), general performance (using PCMark Vantage), and parallel compute (GPGPU) performance (calculated CTP SP GFLOPs). With 3DMark Vantage, Trinity A8 (quad-core), A6 (triple-core), and A4 (dual-core) APUs are seeing a roughly 32% improvement over their respective Llano-based counterparts; with general performance, the improvement is a candid 13.8% on average; but with GPGPU performance, the improvement is a massive 56.3% on average. This could be attributed to the VLIW4 architecture. Lastly, there are notable CrossFire dual-graphics performance improvements.

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

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