July 1 - 8:45am EDT   HP today stepped up the power of its xw9400 workstations with the addition of AMD's six-core Opteron 2400 series to the mix. Also nicknamed Istanbul, the chips give a system as many as 12 cores. HP maintains AMD's view that the chips offer about 34 percent more performance per watt when compared to earlier quad-cores, which often use the same amount of energy. [full story]

March 27 - 10:00am EDT   AMD on Thursday announced the availability of the ATI FirePro V7750 graphics accelerator meant for graphics professionals in the engineering, digital content creation or scientific fields. The 3D graphics accelerator improves on the earlier FireGL V7700 with 1GB of frame buffer memory and OpenGL 3.0 support; it also gets a familiar 128-bit memory controller, a 30-bit display pipeline as well as 320 stream (visual effects) processors. PCI Express 2.0 support gives it more bandwidth on newer mainboards. [full story]

March 9 - 8:25am EDT   AMD on Monday catered to multi-display power users by launching the FirePro 2450. The board is one of the few small, slim video cards to support four displays and can attach as many as four DVI or VGA displays at once, even at 1920x1200 resolution. AMD considers it an option for stock market trackers and others who need as many screens as possible without the space or cost requirements of multiple video cards. [full story]

September 11 - 7:55am EDT   AMD today updated its FirePro workstation-class cards to include the same technology as its Radeon HD 4800 series cards. The V8700 uses the same 800 shader (effects) processors and GDDR5 memory as the Radeon HD 4870 but tunes the peripheral for digital video editing, CAD, and other professional work with 30-bit color rendering. The new architecture equates to an approximately 40 percent boost in performance over the earlier V7700, especially for memory-sensitive apps, according to the company. [full story]

August 7 - 11:25am EDT   AMD on Thursday started up its first new graphics card range in years through the FirePro series. The hardware is based on the company's Radeon HD architecture but is optimized primarily for visual content creation, CAD modeling, and other professional 3D apps. The new cards all have a 30-bit pipeline that renders images internally with as many as one billion colors, preserving the accuracy for very visually rich textures. [full story]