It has been over forty-eight hours since AMD globally launched its flagship Evergreen card based on 40nm architecture. Taking the crown as the fastest GPU in the world to date, the Radeon HD 5970 has held an elevated position in the eyes of the enthusiast consumer due to its raw performance power in high-performance gaming and GPGPU applications.

Yep, no stock.

Our initial impression leads us to believe that the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 OC is a great card and an excellent performer. If you want the fastest money can buy and don't mind spending £530, €629 or $629, this card just might be your thing. Unfortunately, the big issue that remains is limited availability. We will follow up with more very soon.

With the updated Catalyst 9.11 drivers, our results were a lot better than before. Previously, using Flash 10.0 we were unable to view either of the Hulu videos (720p or 480p) in full screen mode without severe stuttering. YouTube HD on the other hand worked fine with 0 dropped frames. Moving to Flash 10.1 with DXVA GPU acceleration, we now see smooth frame rates on all Hulu content and lower CPU usage for both Hulu and YouTube videos. YouTube CPU usage on the Prince of Persia trailer drops 31%, Hulu's Legend of the Seeker drops CPU use 20% while nearly doubling the frame rate (i.e. from dropping half the frames to showing everything), and 480p Hulu drops CPU usage 10% with frame rates almost tripling (from ~13 FPS to over 30 FPS for what appears to be 30 FPS video content).

In addition to reference clocked versions, Sapphire and XFX are apparently first AIB partners that are going to do factory overclocked HD 5970 cards. We already told you that HD 5970 might be an overclocking beast and there might be a lot of room for additional overclocking. It looks like the chip can take it easily and AMD could have dropped it in order to maintain the 294W TDP.

Also from them is news on Powercolor announcing a 5970.

Powercolor is one of many AMD AIB partners that will launch its HD 5970 graphics cards, and as you might have guessed, every card is pretty much the same and there is no word on factory overclocks or non-reference coolers, at least not yet.

If you want one, sorry, Fudo also says they sold out in a day.

ATI partners have told Fudzilla that they received decent quantities of dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 cards, but due to heavy pre-orders and huge interest, they sold out all they had in matter of hours.

Since this is a two way street, AMD will also give some patents to Intel and make the competition less exciting. Nehalem looks much like AMD’s Barcelona and AMD will concentrate on catching up with Intel and bringing innovations that should help the company in 2011 to introduce some cool products such as Fusion as well as its Bulldozer savior core.

On November 17, 2009 AMD made a Form 8-K filing with the SEC regarding the Company’s settlement and patent cross-license agreements with Intel. A redacted version of AMD and Intel’s patent cross-license agreement is now publicly available as part of the attached Form 8-K filing. GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Intel also reached a patent agreement. The specific terms of that agreement are confidential.

The key takeaways from the new AMD, Intel patent cross-license agreement are as follows:


* AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new patent cross-license, with a capture period that has been extended five years.
* The licenses are now royalty free for both parties.
* AMD has broad have made rights including for x86 devices.