Now that the 2012 AMD Financial Anaylst day is over, you're probably struggling to keep up with the new codenames for unreleased products.

Here's AMD's roadmaps:

you’ll note the addition of the “Sea Islands” family to our graphics roadmap. As is typical with our graphics roadmap, we don’t disclose many details beyond the codename. You will have to wait until 2013 to get the rest of the story on that one.

http://blogs.amd.com/work/2012/02/02...d-decoder-key/

Read here for why "Sea Islands" is really 'C-Islands' and in fact 'Canary Islands'

AMD today held their financial analyst day, with some big announcements (other than they're going to focus on execution):

AMD is adopting an SoC-centric roadmap designed to speed time-to-market, drive sustained execution, and enable the development of more tailored customer solutions. SoC design methodology is advantageous because it is a modular approach to processor design, leveraging best practice tools and microprocessor design flows with the ability to easily re-use IP and design blocks across a range of products.

"AMD's strategy capitalizes on the convergence of technologies and devices that will define the next era of the industry," said Rory Read, president and CEO, AMD. "The trends around consumerization, the Cloud and convergence will only grow stronger in the coming years. AMD has a unique opportunity to take advantage of this key industry inflection point. We remain focused on continuing the work we began last year to re-position AMD. Our new strategy will help AMD embrace the shifts occurring in the industry, marrying market needs with innovative technologies and become a consistent growth engine."

Roadmap Updates Focus on Customer Needs Additionally, AMD today announced updates to its product roadmaps for AMD Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) products it plans to introduce in 2012 and 2013. The roadmap modifications address key customer priorities across form factors including ultrathin notebooks, tablets, all-in-ones, desktops and servers with a clear focus on low power, emerging markets and the Cloud.

AMD's updated product roadmap features second generation mainstream ("Trinity") and low-power ("Brazos 2.0") APUs for notebooks and desktops; "Hondo," an APU specifically designed for tablets; new CPU cores in 2012 and 2013 with "Piledriver" and its successor "Steamroller," as well as "Jaguar," which is the successor to AMD's popular "Bobcat" core. In 2012, AMD plans to introduce four new AMD Opteron(TM) processors. For a more in-depth look at AMD's updated product roadmap, please visit http://blogs.amd.com.

Read the full news release here.

Coverage from many sites on the ground shows there are new roadmaps being disclosed, with new codenames appearing.

The good news is APU's are getting GCN architecture, the bad news is not yet. Similarly, the APU's to follow Trinity will be based on the second generation of Bulldozer cores, codenamed Steamroller (Trinity uses first generaton, second revision cores codenamed Piledriver). Unfortunately, it appears no new FX steamroller products for a couple of years.

In GPU news, GCN's first revision will debut under the placeholder codename 'Sea Islands' which SemiAccurate reports is actually Canary Islands (and from what was whispered in our ear at the Tahiti tech day, seems to be true).

The big news is opening up of Heterogeneous System Architecture design to allow additional IP to be inserted into it. This means third parties can really go to town on putting a custom chip together, and should drive some really interesting new products. Firstly, the openness is for the Brazos design, so we won't see, say, a Bulldozer with NV GPU in it.

What we will see is lots of appliance and embedded designs, probably the majority of which consumers don't put their hands on directly. Instead it'll be consumed as part of the final product of the product - think digital signage, prosumer storage appliances, set top/dvr boxes, network appliances etc. This is huge, a giant market for AMD to get their technology in and power the world around us.

New processors for tablets are coming, codename 'Hondo', which along with the BGA version of Trinity will allow AMD partners to build Windows, Linux or Android x86 platform competitors to OS X & ARM iOS/Android devices now available in those spaces. How about an ARM CPU core with AMD Radeon GPU? Put the IP in, pull out the x86. Is that Tegra over there shaking in it's boots?

We've been bugging AMD for years now, literally: show us what GPU-accelerated software can do. Finally, the company is ready to put us in touch with ISVs in nine different segments to demonstrate how its hardware can benefit optimized applications.

Read more at Tom's Hardware Guide

Now that you've read Rage3D's take on AMD's latest Radeon, here are some more reviews from around the Intarweb:

• HIS HD7950 Review @ Kitguru.net
• AMD Radeon HD 7950 Tahiti Pro DirectX 11 GPU Review @ HotHardware.com
• AMD Radeon HD 7950 Launch Articles @ HardwareHeaven.com
• Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC @ PureOverclock.com

More as they're posted!

You don't want to miss this one folks. The review of the card you've been clamoring for these last few weeks has arrived. Continuing to put pressure on Nvidia with it's new offering, check out AMD's Tahiti Pro and what it has to offer.

Read the Rage3D 7950 Launch Review.

Welcome back to another weekly update on Team Rage3D's Folding@Home performance!

This news item is part of a weekly set of updates to raise awareness and encourage participation in Rage3D's Folding@Home team. Folding@home is a distributed computing project created by Stanford that simulates how proteins form, fold, and mis-fold in the body. Running folding@Home allows you to donate your own computer's processing power to help better understand and develop cures for diseases that include cancer, Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's.

It has been several weeks since the last update so lets start by catching up:

Between Dec 18 and Jan 21, Team Rage3D:

• Completed 135,138 Work Units (WUs) for an overall +216.2% increase,
• Earned a total of 41,953,588 Points for an overall +11.7% increase,
• Averaged 310.4 Points Per WU for an overall -64.7% decrease, and
• Averaged 1,198,673.9 Points Per Day (PPD) for an overall +11.7% increase

The thing that sticks out the most on first glace is our massive increase in work unit production. This combined with the decrease in points per WU hints at a much greater diversity of work units being processed rather than focusing on a few high point WU projects. And of course the healthy increase in total points is a good also!

Now let's take a look at the last week:

Between Jan 22 and Jan 28, Team Rage3D:

• Completed 13,653 Work Units (WUs) which is down -63.7% from the week before,
• Earned a total of 9,241,917 Points which is up +6.1% from the week before,
• Averaged 617.9 Points Per WU which is up +192.4%% from the week before,
• Averaged 1,320,273.9 Points Per Day (PPD) which is up +6.1% from the week before, and
• Averaged 107.7 Active Users with a +8 change trend.

Here we can see another rearranging of WUs except this time back to higher value Units. This could either be a result of a change in types of WUs being sent out, or a shift in how people have their clients set up. In any case we say a continued increase in points production, though not as steep as in previous weeks.


On the Team Radar we see a much positive picture than we are used to: we are actually gaining on teams other than Pande Lab! That said we still have other teams hot on our heels hoping to tear away our #29 team position and knock us farther down the team rankings. However, if we can manage to continue increasing our production like we have there is still a chance to stay ahead.

If you would like to join the fight for Rage3D and Science, check out the links below!

Quick-Start Links:

• Stanford's F@H Guide section
• V.7 Beta Client Download Page (Try this first!)
• Why you should use a passkey (Important!)
• Basic Client Download Page
• ATI/AMD V.6 GPU Client Guide (For HD4xxx and older)

If you can't find the answer you're looking for in the above links, then be sure to ask around Rage3D's Distributed Computing Sub-Forum. Happy Folding!

From the create of ATI's Toy Shop demo, comes the AMD Radeon HD 7900 real time demo, 'Leo':

The Leo demo showcases a real-time, DirectX® 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used -- all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage.

Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface. Finally, the lighting in this demo is physically based in that it is fully HDR and the material and reflection models take advantage of the ALU power of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPU to calculate physically accurate light and surface interactions (multiple BRDF equations, realistic use of index of refraction, absorption based on wavelength for metals, etc).

Download it, and movie, from AMD Developer Central [registration required].

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.1 driver:
AMD HD3D technology support enhancement

• Enables support for AMD HD3D technology in conjunction with AMD CrossFireX configurations
• 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

AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver enables users to create per application profiles to individually control 3D and CrossFireX settings for Direct3D applications

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

AMD Catalyst 12.1 Preview driver includes user interface enhancements to simply adjustment of video color and video quality controls

Grab the new drivers here.

The AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 Preview includes all of the features found in AMD Catalyst™ 12.1, plus additional fixes that are not included in the AMD Catalyst 12.1 release. Details can be found in the AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview release notes: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...easenotes.aspx
Grab the AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview here: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...iewdriver.aspx

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.2 driver:

AMD Eyefinity 2.1 technology enhancements

• Additional resolution support: Users can now choose from a larger set of resolutions when running AMD Eyefinity
• Dynamic Configuration Changes: Switching between different display configurations will occur automatically when physically plugging/un-plugging displays
• HydraVision enhancements: The Windows Task bar can now be moved and resized based on users preference
• Profile Manager improvements: Increased support for Display Groups (including 5x1) and Extended configurations within the Profile Manager

Please note that AMD Radeon HD 7900 users should keep using the 8.921.2 RC11 driver found here (the 12.2 preview does not supported the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series): http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx

Read the full news release here of today's AMD Financial news release, highlights below:

For the year ended December 31, 2011, AMD reported revenue of $6.57 billion, net income of $491 million, or $0.66 per share, and operating income of $368 million. Full year non-GAAP net income was $374 million, or $0.50 per share, and non-GAAP operating income was $524 million.

"AMD shipped more than 30 million APU's in 2011, resulting in record annual notebook revenue," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "The unmatched combination of computing and graphics capabilities in our low-power 'Brazos' platform has made it our fastest ramping platform ever, paving the way for continued growth in key segments and geographies. Our server business has re-gained momentum, delivering two consecutive quarters of strong sequential growth.

"We continued optimizing our financial model in 2011, consistently delivering operating income and creating the foundation for sustained success. We begin 2012 clear on our priorities and opportunities. We are building an AMD that consistently delivers on its commitments."

• The AMD Opteron 6200 Series Processors were honored with the Analysts' Choice Award for Best Server Processor by the Linley Group and "Technology of the Year" from InfoWorld.
• AMD Opteron processor adoption in the HPC market continued, as the National Science Foundation announced a new supercomputer at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will be powered by approximately 50,000 AMD Opteron 6200 series processors
• Worldwide demand for AMD APUs continued to increase throughout the fourth quarter. AMD shipped more than 30 million APUs in 2011, including a record number of mobile processors found in notebooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.
• GPU ASP increased sequentially and year-over-year.
• Graphics segment revenue decreased five percent sequentially and 10 percent year-over-year. The sequential decrease was driven primarily by a decline in mobile graphics processor unit (GPU) shipments, partially offset by a seasonal increase in game console revenue. The year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by decreased desktop and Add-in Board (AIB) graphics revenue.
• AMD is the industry leader in leading-edge graphics technology, having shipped more than 100 million DirectX(R) 11 graphics engines across its GPUs and APUs that enable superior visual experiences.

It appears the 30M APU's sold had an effect on discrete mobility GPU sales, as they were no longer needed. No availability of the new AMD Radeon HD 7000 series appears to have dented Q4 desktop discrete sales, too.

Imagination Technologies is not resting on its laurels after becoming a leader in the handheld and tablet business. The company is preparing its return to the world of discrete GPU cards, this time around with a GPGPU product.

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/revenge-...#ixzz1kOTN0IK4

Cooler Master's GeminII range offer top down cooling designs, with the S524 the newest edition. Compatible with 120mm and 140mm fans it can offer an upgrade for your processor cooling - and your whole system.

Cooler Master GeminII S524 CPU Cooler Review

I considered writing a full Weekly Update but then I realized most of you would be more interested in this development instead anyway:


On Friday the 19th we finally cracked the 1 billion mark. Thank you to everyone who helped us get here! Since I couldn't be content with just a picture and a few words, here some rough numbers to give you an idea of where we've been and the path that lies ahead:

• In the approximately 11 years and a few days that Team Rage3d has existed we have averaged about 250,000 points per day.
• At our current points per day of 1.2 million, it will take us about 2.3 years to add another billion points to our total.
• At the moment Team Rage3D is ranked at #29; at our current rate of 1.2PPD it would take us about 25 years to reach the 12 billion points that the #1 team, folding@evga, is at right now.

Stop by the Distributed Computing Sub-Forum to talk about this and other Folding@home related topics. Fold On!

Legitreviews has some nice coverage of AMD's blind truth test the company conducted at this weekends FX GamExperience with [H]ardOCP, in Texas.

ach test station had a ballot that allowed the testers to check the system that gave them a better gaming experience. AMD had roughly 140 people take the challenge during the single day event.
AMD Pepsi Challenge Ballot

The first test that the gamers were issued was down on a pair of $500 gaming machines. System A was powered by an Intel Core i3-2105 ' Sandy Bridge' processor with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and an ASRock H61 motherboard. System B was powered by an AMD A8-3850 'Llano' APU with Radeon HD 6550D on an ASRock A55 motherboard. All of the rest of the components were identical. The obvious goal of this test was to look at similarly priced systems and to see if there was a noticeable difference in gaming performance due to the integrated graphics.

The next challenge given to gamers was two high-end systems that were both running AMD Radeon HD 7970 'Tahati' DirectX 11 graphics cards running an Eyefinity display setup. The Intel system was powered by an Intel Core-i7 2700K 'Sandy Bridge' processor with an ASRock P67 Fatal1ty motherboard and 8GB of AMD DDR3 performance memory. The AMD system was powered by the FX-8150 'Bulldozer' processor an ASRock 990FX Fatal1ty and the same 8GB of AMD DDR3 performance memory. The key to this demo was focused on processor performance and not graphics performance. The Intel Core i7-2700K retails for $369.99 and the AMD FX-8150 retails for $269.99, so the question here was if gamers could tell a difference between the systems.

The blind tests compared two systems for gamers to try out and determine which ran better, worse, or no different. The results? The A6 APU is better than a Core i3, and the FX processor is better than the Core i7.

Read the legitreviews.com write up here.

The Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO is a mid-priced tower cooler for budget minded enthusiasts looking for a solid performing and good looking replacement for their stock cooler. Using Intel's X58 Core i7 platform as a heat load, we test it in single and dual fan configuration.

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler Review

Good news, everyone!

We have just released an updated AMD Catalyst driver for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 family for Windows 7 64-bit: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx

Throughout 2012, AMD Catalyst will be a play key role in the life of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series; it will deliver continuous performance enhancements and new feature support for the new architecture found in the AMD Radeon HD 7900 family. The AMD software development team has already identified a number of opportunities to improve the already amazing AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series. The first set of enhancements can be found in the 8.921.2 RC 11 driver for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series:

Feature highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon HD 7900 driver

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing Preview support for DirectX 10 and Direct X 11 applications

• AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 users can now enable Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst Control Center for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications.
  
• Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

Performance highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon HD 7900 driver

• 8% (up to) performance improvement in Aliens vs. Predator
  
• 15% (up to) performance improvement in Battleforge with Anti-Aliasing enabled
  
• 3% (up to) performance improvement in BattleField 3
  
• 3% (up to) performance improvement in Crysis 2
  
• 6% (up to) performance improvement in Crysis Warhead
  
• 10% (up to) performance improvement in F1 2010
  
• 5% (up to) performance improvement in Unigine with Anti-Aliasing enabled
  
• 250% (up to) performance improvement in TessMark (OpenGL) when set to “insane” levels

Resolved issue highlights of the 8.921.2 RC11 Radeon HD 7900 driver

• Folding@Home: intermittent stability issues have been resolved for the OpenCL version of Folding@Home
• Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 no longer experiences minor flickering with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• Dragon Age 2 no longer experiences minor flickering with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• StarCraft 2 no longer encounters issues when quitting campaign with Tri and Quad CrossFireX configurations
• BattleForge stability has been improved with Tri CrossFireX configurations
• Improved stability when enabling / disabling CrossFireX and installing the AMD graphics driver on AMD CrossFire configurations

The New driver is for AMD Radeon 7900 series and Windows 7 64-bit, and is available here - http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...C11Driver.aspx