AMD will welcome attendees, customers and partners to COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2012 with system demonstrations of the second generation AMD A-Series Accelerated Processor Unit (APU) and the newest AMD E-Series APUs, both designed for best-in-class PC entertainment, gaming, and battery life. A debut event the morning of June 6 in Taipei will underscore the diverse range of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) supporting AMD's 2012 product offerings, provide updates on new products, and demonstrate the powerful applications leveraging the unique processing power of the APU. A live webcast of the "Life More Brilliant" event will be available.

"There could not be a better location than COMPUTEX in Taiwan to recognize our customers and technology partners, and celebrate their contributions to the rapidly growing APU ecosystem," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Global Business Units and host of the upcoming event. "AMD saw consumers wanting a more visually-demanding, entertainment-focused PC experience long ago and created a product strategy to enhance those experiences. This week we will proudly share with the rest of the world the latest advances and accomplishments we have made with our customers."

AMD just released the AMD Catalyst 12.6 Beta. With the release of the Catalyst 12.6 Beta driver, AMD would also like to announce that we are moving away from our Monthly Catalyst release plan. Our goal is to ensure that every Catalyst release delivers a substantial benefit to our end users; as we have today with the release of the Catalyst 12.6a Beta. We will still continue with the Catalyst naming convention; Catalyst: Year.Month., You just won't see a new driver every single month. We are confident that this will only benefit the end user; you'll only need to upgrade to a new Catalyst driver, when it makes sense.

We would also like announce the introduction of our new AMD Issue Reporting Form. We made a number of improvements to the older Catalyst Crew Feedback form, making it more comprehensive, ensuring we get the best feedback possible. Feedback is very important in every product company's life, especially in our fast paced environment. This is not just a check-box for us - we take these reports very seriously. We will review every report posted here and investigate every issue encountered. Please use this form whenever you encounter something worth mentioning.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 12.6 BETA | AMD Catalyst Windows 8 Feature Preview Driver

Although the recent round of price-cuts by AMD covered mainly three SKUs, the HD 7970, HD 7950, and HD 7770; HIS put together its own list of price-cuts covering all Radeon HD 7000 series SKUs launched by it, including its non-reference design and overclocked ones. The new prices (in EUR, incl. taxes) are listed below.

• HIS 7750 iCooler 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DP/DVI/HDM - 89,- Euro
• HIS 7770 iCooler 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMiniDP - 114,90 Euro
• HIS 7870 IceQ X Turbo 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMini DP - 299 Euro
• HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMini DP - 309,90 Euro

A lot of prospective buyers of new generation GPUs were counting on the US $499 launch price of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 to result in reactionary price-cuts in the red camp, particularly with the $549 Radeon HD 7970. NVIDIA's GPU is faster, more efficient, and under normal circumstances, should leave AMD with no other option, but to cut prices of HD 7970 to stay competitive. However, that hasn't happened, and according to a HardwareCanucks report, will not happen any time soon.

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 launch wasn't just on paper, there was market-availability on launch-day, although like every other new GPU launch, stocks have been quite limited. Before this launch, AMD and its partners managed to replenish inventories of Radeon HD 7970, making it generally available, while not budging from its ~$549 price. Sources told HardwareCanucks and this situation won't change unless NVIDIA has a more full-fledged lineup of new-generation GPUs against AMD's, or unless the availability of GeForce GTX 680 drastically improves.

AMD finally posted Catalyst 12.2 WHQL driver suite, the one package that installs drivers and system software for AMD/ATI Radeon GPUs, AMD APU graphics, AMD chipset-integrated graphics, etc. Catalyst 12.2 WHQL brings official support for Radeon HD 7700 series, and Radeon HD 7900 series (for Windows 7/Vista only, for Windows XP it will be added with Catalyst 12.4). Super-sampling AA (SSAA) is now available for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications, supported on the Radeon HD 7700 series and HD 7900 series. It must be enabled through Catalyst Control Center, and application profiles, and games should support in-game AA modes.

AMD also introduced enhancements for Eyefinity 2.1, including custom-resolutions, dynamic configuration changes (switching between different display configurations will occur automatically by loading the appropriate profile, when plugging/unplugging displays); Windows Taskbar re-positioning, and improvements with the Eyefinity Profile Manager. For more information, please refer to the Release Notes document.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 12.2 WHQL

In the second quarter of this year, AMD will launch its next-generation accelerated processing unit, codenamed "Trinity", starting with quad-core A10 and A8 parts in the quarter, followed by dual-core A6 and A4 parts in the third-quarter of 2012 (more here). DonanimHaber scored a specifications-sheet that details all the models AMD has in store for this year, also giving us an insight to what constitute each of these model numbers.

An interesting revelation here is that AMD does not have triple-core APUs anywhere in its lineup. The A10 lineup consists of quad-core APUs that come with Radeon HD 7660D graphics, while the A8 lineup also consists of quad-core APUs, but with slower Radeon HD 7560D graphics. The A6 lineup consists of dual-core APUs with Radeon HD 7540D graphics, while the A4 lineup has dual-core APUs with Radeon HD 7480D graphics.

Here are the first pictures of ASUS' premium DirectCu II graphics card designed around AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GPU. The design is based on giving the GPU a powerful cooling solution, backed by a custom-design PCB. Since its cooling solution spans across three expansion slots, one of the three expansion slot brackets is productively used to provide additional display connectivity. To begin with, the PCB uses a 10+1+1 ASUS Digi+ VRM that draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. It supports heavy overclocking, and provides several voltage tuning features.

A common metal heatsink spans along the length of the card, making contact with VRM and memory components. On top of this sits the DirectCu II heatsink. This heatsink uses a large aluminum fin-stack heatsink to which heat from the GPU is conveyed by six heat-pipes, which make direct contact with it. The heatsink itself isn't very thick, but what makes the card span across three slots are its two 100 mm fans. The GPU is clocked out of the box at 1000 MHz (vs. 925 MHz reference), and 5.60 GHz/1400 MHz actual memory (vs. 5.50 GHz/1375 MHz actual reference).

ZOTAC International, a leading innovator and a channel manufacturer, today kicks off the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show with a trio of versatile 2nd-Generation ZBOX mini-PCs for all your computing needs. The new ZOTAC ZBOX ID81, ID80 and AD04 series deliver outstanding energy-efficiency and stunning high-definition video playback in a compact form factor.

2nd-Generation ZBOX platform enhancements debuting with the ZBOX ID81, ID80 and AD04 series include an external WiFi antenna for superior wireless reception, integrated Bluetooth 3.0 technology and a bundled Media Remote with USB IR receiver for use with Microsoft Windows Media Center, XBMC and other popular media player applications.

Welcome to the first TechPowerUp news post of 2012! Read on for a couple of impressive overclocking feats with the HD 7970 graphics card.

It looks like the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 could be a bit of a dark horse and a lot more potent than its stock specifications would suggest - excellent for creating a competitive graphics card market. The reviews at stock speeds show the flagship HD 7970 to be around 10-15% faster than NVIDIA's flagship GTX 580, which doesn't seem all that impressive since the GTX 580 has been on the market for over a year now. However, what the reviews haven't really shown, is what kind of an overclocking monster the HD 7970 is. It definitely looks like AMD could have easily beaten the GTX 580 by a much bigger margin than they did, had they wanted to and it makes one wonder why they didn't.

VR-Zone have spent the New Year weekend overclocking this beast, having reached a whopping 1.26 GHz core clock speed with their HD 7970 - and decent benchmark improvements to go with it. Also, with the fan at 100%, the card never got above a very comfortable 68 degrees centigrade while running Furmark, which is amazing considering how this test is specifically designed to heat a graphics card to the max - but please see the update at the bottom of the article. The stock cooler may be noisy, but it's certainly very effective: an excellent result which will prolong the working life of the card.

A Japanese overclocker achieved a 96% CPU clock speed increase and 121% GPU clock speed increase during a "suicide-run" using a retail AMD A8-3870K Black Edition processor. The feat was conducted by OverclockWorks, a tech-community and store for Japanese overclockers. A CPU clock speed of 5,875 MHz was achieved using a base clock speed of 125 MHz, and multiplier of 47.0x, and a brutal core voltage of 1.872V. The integrated Radeon HD 6550D GPU was overclocked to 1,327 MHz from its default 600 MHz. The overclocker claimed that his feat is "probably the world's best", though, like some of the most unstable suicide-runs, the system was too unstable to run benchmarks. Apart from the A8-3870K, the test-bench consisted of ASUS F1A75-V Pro motherboard, G.Skill RipjawsZ memory, and a certain SilverStone PSU.

Not quite two weeks ago, we reported on leaked pictures of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7770 mid-range graphics card based on the new Southern Islands architecture and listed its basic specs. Well, the leaks keep coming and bigpao007 of ChipHell has leaked more pictures with some benchmarks to go with them. The test setup consisted of an Ivy Bridge ES CPU - Core i5-3550K at 3.3Ghz and Z77 chipset-based motherboard. The driver used was the AMD Catalyst 8.940 RC2, giving the following 3DMark benchmark results:

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

AMD today updated its A-Series line-up of desktop and notebook Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), further improving its top-performing family of dual- and quad-core APUs. Along with speed and performance improvements, AMD Steady Video update make this unique feature more compelling than ever. For desktop users, AMD extends its overclocking pedigree to the APU; for the first time users can tune both x86 and graphics settings in a single processor for boosted performance.

The updated AMD A-Series APUs combine up to four x86 CPU cores with up to 400 Radeon cores, delivering powerful DirectX 11-capable, discrete-level graphics and dedicated HD video processing on a single chip. These new APUs increase performance and deliver a richer feature set than existing AMD A-series APUs. Plus, only AMD APUs offer AMD Dual Graphics for an up to 144 percent visual performance boost when a select APU is paired with a select AMD Radeon HD 6500 Series graphics card.

We've already been through the specifications of HD 7970 "Tahiti" in some detail that matters to those who can draw a performance hunch looking at them. This latest slide shows you the feature-set this GPU comes with. To begin with, there are three main categories of feature updates: Graphics CoreNext, AMD Eyefinity 2.0, and AMD APP Acceleration. AMD claims CoreNext to be a "revolutionary" new architecture that changes the way the GPU crunches numbers.

For the past five generations (since Radeon HD 2000), AMD GPUs have used the VLIW (very-long instruction word) core arrangement. Even the latest VLIW4 introduced by Radeon HD 6900 series, was an evolution, than a revolution of that. CoreNext replaces VLIW stream processors with super-scalar Graphics Compute cores. This should translate to higher performance per mm² die-area, resulting in smaller GPUs, giving AMD room for greater cost-cutting if the competition from NVIDIA for this generation takes effect. The GPU itself is built on TSMC's new 28 nm silicon fabrication process. Next up, AMD confirmed support for PCI-Express 3.0 interface, that nearly doubles system bus bandwidth over the previous generation.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 launch is just around the corner. Ahead of its launch, AMD conducted its usual press briefing. DonanimHaber has access to some of the slides shown in that meeting. Earlier this day, we brought you perhaps the most important of them all, specifications. Let's take a look at the reference board design itself. AMD is sticking to the black+red colour scheme, and has come up with a swanky new cooling assembly design. The design, unlike those of higher-end Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards, is surprisingly curvy and features dashes of red plastic making up its contours, surrounded by tougher black ABS.

A welcome change here from the previous generations, is that the card is truly single-slot capable, when say, a single-slot full-coverage water block is used. High-end cards from previous generation HD 5000 and HD 6000 have a dual DVI connector cluster that extends into two expansion slots, which many enthusiasts found to be annoying, especially when setting up benches with four single-GPU graphics cards in scenarios where PCI-Express slot spacing isn't kind. Moving on to display connectivity, the card has one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors, all arranged in the confines of a single expansion slot. The space of the second slot is dedicated to a hot-air exhaust of the cooling assembly. All board partners are required to ship HDMI-to-DVI dongles, and active mini-DP dongles.

If slide leaked on Orb-Hardware is to be believed we GPU consumers are in for a pretty big treat in the next month or so. The slide shown below states that the AMD 7970 will have a default core clock speed of 925MHz and a whopping 3 GB of GDDR5 memory.

It also sports a 3.5 TFLOPs precision floating point. Which would put it well beyond the NVIDIA flagship single GPU solution. The slide states the a ROP count of 32, against an earlier speculated count of 48. This could be because AMD may have delinked ROP clusters from memory bus. The cooler itself is under the trademark AMD black shroud so there is no way to see if it uses the rumored "vapor chamber" as seen in after market solutions.

Looking past all the beastly prowess of this slide one cannot help but think about power draw. The "leaked" slide states the 7970 will have a peak power draw of 300 W and an idle draw of 3 W. We will have to wait for review to see if any of these amazing stats are true.

AMD today released its latest unofficial drivers, Catalyst 12.1 Preview. Surprisingly, this release comes ahead of the month's scheduled WHQL-signed release, Catalyst 11.12 WHQL. According to sources, 12.1 Preview is the first driver that provides early (read: rough-on-the-edges) support for AMD's next generation Radeon HD 7900 series graphics cards, scheduled for launch on the 9th of January, 2012. That apart, Catalyst 12.1 brings the following changes to the table:

• AMD HD3D technology support enhancement
  o Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
  o Delivers a new Stereo 3D mode over HDMI 1.4a connections - 1080p at 30Hz is now enabled on supported displays.
• AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements - Application Profiles
  o AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications
  o Please be sure to select the "Restore Factory Defaults" option under the Catalyst
• Control Center Preferences menu before using the new application profiles feature - this ensures there are no compatibility issues between previous drivers and the new AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver with regards to application profiles
• AMD Catalyst Control Center / Vision Engine Control Center enhancements - Video UI improvements
  o AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls
• Performance highlights of the AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver (in addition to the AMD Catalyst 11.11c performance driver)
  o Improves performance (10%) in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on the AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series for single GPU and AMD CrossFireX configurations

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview

Ladies and Gentlemen with graphics card upgrade plans, circle the date January 09, 2012, for this is going to be the day AMD will launch its next generation high-performance graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7900 series, according to reliable market sources DonanimHaber spoke with. On the 9th, AMD is expected to unveil at least two new SKUs in the HD 7900 series, most likely, HD 7970 and HD 7950. These will be based on the new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon that will use completely redesigned number-crunching machinery, and a very wide memory bus.

Korean company Zalman, known more for its innovative PC air cooling solutions, PSUs, and cases, entered the graphics card business. The company is now an AMD Radeon add-in board (AIB) partner, and started its lineup off with some upper-mainstream models. It makes perfect sense for Zalman to enter this business, as it holds some expertise with high-end graphics card cooling solutions. Zalman can source PCBs from any of the major foundries such as PC Partner, Hightech Information Systems, or TUL, and assemble its coolers on top of them. Zalman's first three graphics cards are based on Radeon HD 6870, HD 6850, and HD 6770, with AMD reference clock speeds. What markets Zalman will target its new graphics card lineup with, is not known.

Over the week, AMD launched three of the first notebook GPUs in the Radeon HD 7000 series in a bid to stay competitive in the notebook GPU market, even if it means re-branding already launched GPUs like NVIDIA did, with its recent GeForce 600M series launch. The newly [re]launched mGPUs include Radeon HD 7400M, HD 7500M, and HD 7600M. The three are based on current-generation Caicos and Turks GPUs.

The HD 7400M is based on the "Caicos" silicon, featuring 160 stream processors, 8 TMUs, 4 ROPs, and a 64-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The HD 7500M and HD 7600M are based on the "Turks" silicon, the HD 7500M features 480 stream processors, 24 TMUs, 8 ROPs, and 64-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface (more economical with lower number of memory chips, while offering the same performance as 128-bit DDR3); while the HD 7600M features all the features of the HD 7500M, including the full 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

AMD is on course to releasing its latest "Southern Islands" GPU family, and a fleet of desktop graphics card SKUs based on it, which will be led by a new high-performance GPU, codenamed "Tahiti", which will make up Radeon HD 7900 series; followed by performance GPU "Pitcairn", on which HD 7800 series will be based; "Thames" and "Lombok" making up the rest of the lineup. According to a report by DonanimHaber, HD 7970 (working name) is expected to be competitive with (or outperform) GeForce GTX 580, and priced at US $499. The HD 7950 will be competitive with (again, or outperform) GeForce GTX 570, being priced at US $399.

Things get interesting with Pitcairn, which is the successor of "Barts". This performance GPU is designed for sweet-spot SKUs, such as HD 7870 and HD 7850, which will be competitive with GeForce GTX 560 Ti / GTX 560, and priced at US $299 and $199, respectively. The Radeon HD 7670 will be particularly expensive, priced at US $179, followed by HD 7650 at $119. Further, it was reported that HD 7970 and HD 7950 will have a standard memory size of 3 GB.

AMD published the third performance driver based on Catalyst 11.11, the Catalyst 11.11c. The driver addresses some glaring issues ahead of the upcoming Catalyst WHQL monthly update. The new performance driver addresses the following issue:

Elder Scrolls Skyrim

• Delivers AMD CrossfireX performance scaling for the AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series

Apart from the applied changes, the new Catalyst 11.11c includes all the changes brought about by previous Catalyst 11.11 performance drivers.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11c Performance Driver for Windows 7 and Vista | Windows XP

TechPowerUp released a new version of GPU-Z, version 0.5.6. GPU-Z is our popular graphics card information and diagnostic utility that gives you technical details of the graphics hardware installed in your PC, and lets you monitor fine details such as clock speeds, temperatures, and voltages. The new version adds preliminary support for some of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce Kepler family GPUs. It also adds support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 CUDA cores, which will be launched this 29th. Support is also added for AMD Radeon HD 6320, FirePro V9800, FirePro V4900, GeForce GTX 460 V2 (GTX 460 based on GF114), Quadro NVS 420, Quadro NVS 450, and Quadro FX 380 LP. A small bug related to incorrect shader reading on "Blackcomb" is fixed.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.6 | GPU-Z 0.5.6 ASUS ROG Edition

AMD released its latest "performance driver" for Radeon graphics cards, the Catalyst 11.11a. With this release, AMD is using the term "performance driver" to refer to performance-enhancing Hotfix updates it launches between its scheduled monthly WHQL-signed updates. Catalyst 11.11a fixes some outstanding game-related bugs and improves performance and resolves driver-related bugs for a variety of recently-released titles such as Batman: Arkham City, Rage, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Battlefield 3. The rest of the driver is based on Catalyst 11.11.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 11.11a Performance Driver for Windows 7 or Vista | Windows XP

A list of changes follows.

HP today announced the HP Slate 2 Tablet PC with expanded touch capabilities, enhanced multitasking performance and embedded security, providing added flexibility to mobile business users. The company also announced a new notebook PC targeting business, education and government customers.

The HP Slate 2 Tablet PC provides instant deployment for business and vertical markets such as education, healthcare, government and retail, where jobs frequently take users away from a traditional desk. With a full-featured Microsoft Windows environment, the 1.5 pound HP Slate 2 Tablet PC provides professionals with the flexibility to create, edit and review content on one highly mobile and lightweight device.