| MacUpdate Weekend Sale | :This weekend MacUpdate has slashed prices on Painter 12 and Painter Lite. Painter 12 retails for $429, but has been reduced by 54% to $199. Painter Lite has seen a 58% price cut from $69 to $29. Hurry, because these deals are only available until May 19th 2013. |
Origin PC has announced the launch of the new AMD Radeon HD 7990 dual GPU graphics card for its line of enthusiast hardware. Powered by AMD’s Graphics Core Next Architecture, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 features an astounding 8.6 billion transistors, 4,096 stream processors, 6GB DDR5 memory and up to 8.2 teraflops of computing power.
EVGA has announced the GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, a new video card for the Mac Pro. The hardware uses 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, and includes four outputs: HDMI, DisplayPort 1.1, and two dual-link DVI connections. The card can also be used alongside Boot Camp and/or Windows, and supports standards including OpenCL and CUDA, which allow a video card to handle non-graphics tasks.
Component maker Sapphire has officially launched the Mac Edition of its Radeon HD 7950 video card. The add-on includes 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and is said to boost game framerates by as much as 200 percent or more, and general benchmark performance by about 30 percent. Graphics-heavy benchmarks are claimed to run up to 300 percent faster than possible with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.
The first OS X 10.8.3 beta includes drivers for AMD's Radeon HD 7900-series video cards, the 7950 and 7970, notes Netkas.org. The cards aren't in any current Macs; they're in fact based on AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture, and are each equipped with 3GB of DDR5 RAM. It's believed that Apple could be including the drivers for the sake of a new Mac Pro.
MSI has shown off its latest gaming notebook, the Windows 8-powered, 15.6-inch GX60. It gets an AMD quad-core A10-series processor rated at 2.3GHz but that can operate at up to 3.2GHz and paired with AMD's Radeon HD 7970M GPU with 2GB of dedicated RAM. The 8GB of RAM can be upgraded to 16GB.
Digital Storm, maker of gaming-oriented desktops and notebooks, has just unveiled what it's calling the fastest gaming notebook. The X17E sports a 17-inch, 1080p display and will get either NVIDIA's GTX 680M or AMD's Radeon 7970M GPUs. The available Intel Core i7 3920XM can be overclocked to 4.5GHz.
In addition to making official the Special Edition 15R leaked earlier, along with the smaller 14R, Dell on Tuesday also announced XPS 8500 and Vostro 470 desktop PC families. Both feature Intel's third-generation Core-series processors, dubbed Ivy Bridge. Meant for gamers, graphics professionals, or movie editors, the XPS 8500 desktops are offered with either a 3.1GHz Quad Core i5 3450 or 3.4GHz Quad Core i7 3770.
Epson has become the latest manufacturer to make computers based on Intel's Ivy Bridge chipset available to customers. On Tuesday, the manufacturer debuted a line of customizable, business-to-business oriented entry level desktops for the Japanese market.
AMD offered its answer to NVIDIA on Tuesday through the Radeon HD 7000M. The 7700M, 7800M, and 7900M are the first parts to use Enduro, a live graphics switching technology like NVIDIA's Optimus. The implementation can flip between the Radeon and integrated graphics without having to reload or specify apps, and unlike NVIDIA's approach, can work with both AMD processors as well as Intel's.
Gaming PC maker Digital Storm has released a new range called Marauder that fills the entry level of the market. Housed in a Corsair Vengeance C70 tower, the base, Level 1, $800 model gets a quad-core, 3.6GHz AMD FX-4100 processor and a 1GB Radeon HD 7750 for graphics, along with 8GB of 1,600MHz RAM. Next up is the $1,000 Level 2, which sports a 3.1GHz AMD FX-8120 CPU and a Radeon HD 7770 graphics card.
The next-generation Xbox console, which may or may not be called the Xbox 720, may be powered by a 16-core CPU, SlashGear reported on Friday. That CPU may be branded as IBM Power PC, and be paired with one or two GPUs that has comparable processing power to AMD's Radeon HD 7000. That power will be needed to run next-generation games and the Kinect successor, which is said to be able to read lips and fingertips as well as track multiple players and thus require at least four cores.
Zotac has released a mini-PC called the Zbox Nano XS AD11 Plus. The 1.5-inch high computer boasts a 64GB SSD and AMD Fusion 1.65GHz dual core processor with Radeon HD 6320 graphics, along with its small size.
Toshiba has brought out two new performance laptops alongside today's earlier affordable notebook announcement. The Satellite P800 series will be powered by Intel's Ivy Bridge processors and NVIDIA GeForce 630M discrete graphics, while the Satellite S800 series will have the choice of Ivy Bridge or AMD's most recent notebook processors with optional AMD graphics.
Sony has quietly revamped its VAIO E in Europe to make real one of the CES prototypes we saw in January. The VAIO E 14P has a new, wrap-around design that makes the top surface look like one continuous shell. The white, black, and pink 14-inch PCs all have a new two-tone design with trim around the edges, keyboard, and trackpad in a contrasting color that sets off the design.
A new and potentially far-reaching rumor has had TSMC's 28-nanometer manufacturing capacity significantly hampered for about half of the year. Supply was said by Digitimes, which has a mixed track record, to be tight enough that it wouldn't clear up until the end of the summer. The shortage was enough that it was purportedly forcing AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm to all limit their releases or find alternative suppliers.
Sony's PlayStation Orbis may have had some of its specifications firmed up through an unusually detailed rumor. The next-generation combo is now believed by IGN to be using one of AMD's current higher-end processors, the quad-core 2.9GHz A8-3850, with the as yet unannounced Radeon HD 7670. While the graphics would be considered low-end by modern standards, the A8's integrated Radeon HD 6550D video might be used in an asynchronous pairing to offload some tasks.
A currently uncertain but unusually detailed rumor Monday has Microsoft's next-generation Xbox making aggressive decisions on hardware. Multiple tips to VG24/7 supported AMD's hints of movie-quality 3D graphics with claims there would be two Radeon HD 7000 graphics cores. Rather than simply pair them up to form a single virtual card, as with AMD's usual CrossFire, it would have each core rendering separate objects in the same scene.
Gradually mounting talk of early PlayStation 4 plans culminated Wednesday with a potentially telling rumor. Believed to be codenamed Orbis or "circle," possibly to make it part of a "circle of life" with the Vita, the system outlined to Kotaku would not just break from using the Cell processor but from the entire Power and NVIDIA graphics combo. Instead, it would reportedly use a 64-bit, x86-based AMD processor as well as graphics based on AMD's Southern Island core, used in the Radeon HD 7700 series and up.
NVIDIA formally brought its Kepler graphics core to the market Thursday, starting with its desktop line. The GeForce GTX 680 introduces new multiprocessing core groups known as SMX; they reportedly provide twice as much performance for the same energy as the GeForce 500 series. With three times as many cores as its ancestor (1,536), 2GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory, and a 1GHz base clock, it's purportedly 43 percent faster in a game like Skyrim than AMD's Radeon HD 7970, even as it uses 28 percent less power.
The Lunix 3.3 kernel was released this past weekend, bringing with it a number of changes and, notably, the ability to run Android or its apps. An interview with a newly minted Fellow of the Linux Foundation member, Greg KH, by MuktWare reveals that while the new release will let users boot into the Android userspace without modifications, power management isn't very good. Some of the other changes include better general power management, Radeon HD 5000 HDMI audio support, more driver support, and a number of other, more complex changes.
HP has inadvertently confirmed plans from both AMD and Intel for future processors through a slew of notebook listings. The Pavilion dv4, dv6, and dv7 all have Intel's Ivy Bridge inside. The smaller two systems are using the quad 2.3GHz Core i7-3610M, while the dv7 has a similarly four-core 2.6GHz Core i7-3720QM.
Some early specs and an image of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 680 graphics card have been leaked thanks to China's PCOnline and ChipHell. It will be the company's first based on the 28nm architecture and reportedly sport a clock speed of 1,006MHz, but can be overclocked to 1,058MHz for short bursts. There are also said to be 1,536 visual processing cores onboard, along with 2GB of RAM on a 256-bit memory bus.
AMD put the last touches on the Radeon HD 7000 line Monday with the Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 GHz Edition (links active soon). The two aim directly at the mid-range for gamers and are roughly twice the complexity of the 7700 line. The decision gives the 7850 and 7870 a respective 1,024 and 1,280 stream (visual effects) cores, 64 and 80 texture units, and a common 256-bit memory bus with 4.8GHz GDDR5 memory.
A potentially major rumor has asserted that Apple was at one point investingating using AMD's Llano architecture mobile processors in the MacBook Air. The company had the kind of power and performance Apple wanted, Forbes heard, but had trouble producing chips in time for the 2011 update. As its former manufacturing wing and now partner GlobalFoundries was adapting to make the Fusion-based chips, where the graphics core is part of the processor itself, it was having trouble generating useful test yields.
The developer preview of OS X Mountain Lion already supports some more recent AMD and NVIDIA video cards without any tweaks, according to forum posts by so-called Hackintosh users. Several posts from the Netkas.org forums indicate that an AMD Radeon 6950 running Netkas EFI will work natively in Mountain Lion. One even claims that a 6950 will continue to work after "warm booting back to Lion from Mountain Lion."
AMD's recently departed graphics CTO Eric Demers is now thought to have jumped ship for Qualcomm. An insider connection talking to The Inquirer said the graphics expert had made the hop "under good terms," but partly in the view that Qualcomm wasn't seen as a direct competitor. Intel and NVIDIA may have tried to poach him in the past.
AMD took its Radeon HD 7000 series to the starter level quickly on Wednesday. The Radeon HD 7750 and 7750 GHz Edition step back in visual processor counts versus the 6700 line, from 720 and 800 cores to 512 and 640 respectively, but make up for it through more than a year's worth of technology. Both the new overall architecture and a shrink to a leaner 28 nanometer building process let the 7750 and 7770 climb to 800MHz and 1GHz core speeds (up from 700MHz and 850MHz).
More leaks have surfacesd around the upcoming Alienware M18X R2 that have outlined its potential graphics power. The two higher-end graphics cores, the as-yet unannounced Radeon HD 7970M and GeForce GTX 675M, will both be available in twin-chip setups for very high-end systems if Dell-Lab's historically accurate tips are right. A GeForce GTX 660M would occupy the bottom and might be the only graphics without a dual-chip option in the 18-inch gaming notebook.
Another AMD executive departure has fueled speculation Tuesday. Graphics division CTO Eric Demers is known to be exiting the chip designer as of February 17. Former Apple executive and current primary CTO Mark Papermaster would temporarily take over during his absence.
AMD in conversations at the end of the week wouldn't discount the possibility of making ARM-based processors. When pressed by Wired, CTO and former Apple executive Mark Papermaster made the unusual non-denial that "the answer is not no." The company's long-term plans were aiming for a modular chip design that could drop in ARM or another architecture without losing Radeon graphics or other AMD-specific touches.
AMD has hoped to corner the more widely accessible range of high-end video cards Tuesday by unveiling the Radeon HD 7950. It trims back slightly from the range-leading 7970 with 1,792 visual processing cores instead of 2,048, 112 texture units instead of 128, and both 800MHz core and 1.25GHz memory clock speeds versus the 925MHz and 1.38GHz of its counterpart. The chipset is still powerful enough to handle 4K video and carries the 384-bit memory bus and 3GB of video RAM.
NVIDIA was accused this week of using dishonest marketing to try to skew gamers towards its next-generation Kepler graphics hardware. Posters in the ChipHell forums claiming to have details of the new graphics core were reportedly discovered to be NVIDIA marketers. They made bold claims about Kepler's prices and performance in what appeared to be an attempt to downplay AMD's Radeon HD 7900 line.
Lenovo has stepped up its gaming credentials by quietly taking orders for the IdeaPad Y470p. The 14-inch notebook swaps out NVIDIA's low-end GeForce GT 520M video of the regular Y470 for a mid-range AMD Radeon HD 7690M, giving it an edge in 3D games. The 2.2GHz quad Core i7 and 8GB of RAM help keep the system running at full pace.
The third-generation Xbox could mark a symbolic switch in storage but also a step back for game ownership. Kotaku understood from a rumor source that it would keep an optical drive but jump to Blu-ray, allowing it to hold larger games and play offline HD movies. For Microsoft, it would be the footnote to the HD disc debate of the mid-2000s, where the company officially backed HD DVD but was forced to drop plans after Toshiba axed the format and eventually supported Blu-ray.
A culmination of rumors may have given the first clearer picture of the next-generation Xbox's hardware. A tip to IGN has the system using graphics hardware roughly equivalent to AMD's Radeon HD 6670. Although strictly a mid-range graphics chip on the desktop, it would allegedly be about six times faster than the Xbox 360's 2005-era video.
Sony in a post-CES update has tweaked several of its VAIO notebooks for the spring. The VAIO Z now has the option of 4G LTE access on Verizon, making it one of the first full-powered notebooks with the choice. The $1,950 ultraportable now comes in a Carbon Fiber Silver color and gets newer Core i5 and i7 processors from the late 2011 upgrade.
AT&T just revealed it has began selling Acer's 11.6-inch Aspire One A0722 netbook. The dual-core, 1GHz AMD C-50 system sports a full-sized keyboard and can connect to the carrier's HSPA+ network. A six-cell battery may give it long battery life, although it's not known by how long.
Microsoft on Monday confirmed that the first Surface 2.0 table, the Samsung Surface SUR40, was shipping. Coming out a year after it was first shown, the multi-touch table introduces optics in the panel itself that can see objects and react accordingly. It can now react to as many as 50 simultaneous contact points and uses a quicker 2.9GHz AMD Athlon II X2, a Radeon HD 6700M graphics chip, and runs on Windows 7.
Samsung had a few extra stand-out devices at its CES booth this past week, and we got to try many of them. The Series 9 All-In-One PC is effectively Samsung's answer to the 27-inch iMac. Whatever you think of Samsung's affinity for Apple design, the 9 is certainly unique just from aesthetic perspective: it uses Samsung's distinctive asymmetric look and tucks all of the computer into the base, leaving the display itself to be less than half an inch thick.
Signs of a long-in-waiting Mac Pro update have appeared in earnest through the Apple Store. Picking either the 12-core stock workstation or most build-to-order changes knocks the shipping time back to between one to three weeks, usually a sign at Apple that supplies are dwindling. A refresh isn't necessarily imminent and might depend on both the sales rate of remaining stock and how soon new components are ready.
A detailed leak may have given out details of AMD's mid-range Radeon HD 7000-series desktop graphics. The 7750 and 7750 as explained by Fudzilla would sit on the new mainstream Cape Verde Pro and XT cores and each scale back considerably from the higher-end but more expensive Radeon HD 7970. Both would drop from 384-bit to 128-bit memory interfaces and 900MHz core clock speeds.
AMD on Thursday retook the top spot for single-card graphics speed through the Radeon HD 7970. The video card is the first anywhere to use a 28 nanometer chipmaking process and uses this to pack 2,048 cores, or a third more than the Radeon HD 6970 it's replacing. Performance comes also through a newly widened 384-bit memory bus, PCI Express 3.0, and a full 3GB of GDDR5 memory, again a record for a single-chip card.
Chipmaker AMD on Tuesday revealed updates to its A-series desktop and notebook Fusion processors. The flagship dual-core and quad-core chips get speed boosts, and users can for the first time overclock the x86 and graphics settings on unlocked models. All the chips also get the AMD Steady Video feature, which is meant to get rid of the shakes and jitters in home videos.
More information on AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7900-series graphics cards and the HD 7970 model in particular, have appeared online, thanks to OBR-Hardware. The new slide reveals a compute power of 3.5 teraflops and a 925MHz core clock speed. The 2,048 shader processors seen here confirm an earlier report as well.
NVIDIA took a major step towards spurring growth of its CUDA general-purpose code technology for video cards on Tuesday by posting the CUDA source code. Developers and education now have access to a variant on the LLVM compiler that will let them add new processor types and languages. The extension could see CUDA run on AMD's Radeon hardware, Intel's integrated graphics, and even use relatively old code like Fortran.
Dell has updated its Alienware Aurora gaming desktops introduced at the past CES show. The new PC is being touted as the most advanced Alienware desktop created thus far, sporting a choice of second-generation, six-core Core i7 chips ranging in a factory-overclocked clock speed between 3.9GHz and 4.2GHz, along with the X79 Express chipset and as much as 16GB of quad-channel DDR3 RAM. Active vents and a liquid-cooling system are present to keep the system running quietly.
AMD's Australian and New Zealand regional head Brian Slattery in a discussion [reg. required] Monday said that AMD could have its own take on ultrabooks could arrive as soon as January, likely at CES. Calling them "ultrathins" in a likely attempt to avoid colliding with Intel's term, he explained to The Australian that processors for thin but fast computing would be ready soon. In opposition to Intel, however, AMD didn't have set guidelines and would let companies use larger screens as well as thicker and heavier systems if they felt it necessary.
Samsung in its home country has rolled out the Series 5 Ultra in what's considered a tenuous claim to the ultrabook title. While a 13-inch system at 0.6 inches thick and 3.1 pounds is largely inside of the official definitions, the 14-inch system at four pounds and 0.8 inches is outside of the class, even with an aluminum shell. In including the choice of an optical drive, they also fit more closely to the definition of a traditional notebook.
Signs of Apple's long-in-waiting Mac Pro update emerged in earnest after a discovery in the latest Mac OS X 10.7.3 beta. Netkas found code references in the ATIRadeonX3000 driver extension to "Tahiti," the known codename for AMD's upcoming high-end desktop Radeon HD 7000 line. The chipsets are expected to be the first 28-nanometer chips and have a completely new, liquid-cooled graphics core meant to improve general-purpose computing tasks like those in OpenCL.
NVIDIA orchestrated a mid-cycle upgrade for the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. A new Limited Edition bumps it from 384 visual processing cores to 448 to keep it relevant. While the main, individual, and memory clock speeds take a step back to 732MHz, 1.46GHz, and 900MHz each, NVIDIA is counting on the extra parallelism and a jump to a wider 320-bit memory bus (up from 256-bit) with 1.25GB of RAM to let it handle considerably more at once.
