There are not a lot of details available at this point, but what we do know is that when single-thread performance is needed most, Thuban processors will automatically disable idle cores and overclock the remaining engines to the maximum possible level that is determined by general thermal design power. The technology will be completely hardware-based, hence, will work in any operating system that supports six-core chips. The technology is presently called “C-state performance boost”, however, it is more than likely that AMD will introduce a better sounding marketing name when it launches six-core chips in the second quarter of the year.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) has announced its entire currently available family of ATI FirePro™ professional graphics have been certified by Autodesk® for AutoCAD® 2010 software on Windows® 71. As an industry leader in 2D and 3D design and documentation software, AutoCAD 2010 technology supports the latest Microsoft operating system to help deliver fast performance and exceptional stability for professionals working on complex design projects.

In addition, the ATI FirePro™ V5700, ATI FirePro™ V7750, ATI FirePro™ V8700, and ATI FirePro™ V8750 accelerators have been certified for use with Autodesk® Showcase® 2010 software on Windows 7¹. Autodesk Showcase visualization software facilitates informed decision making on digital prototypes by allowing users to create highly accurate, realistic imagery from 3D CAD data to help communicate brand character.

Adding to the ever-growing list of more than 90 certifications for the AMD professional line of graphics products, various AMD products are also certified for use with the Autodesk® software listed below. Information on certified AMD products for each Autodesk software application is available through the linked product names.

• Autodesk® 3ds Max®
• Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design
• Autodesk® Alias® family of products
• Autodesk® Inventor®
• Autodesk® Maya®
• Autodesk® MotionBuilder®
• Autodesk® Mudbox™
• Autodesk® Softimage®

* Engine clock speed: 650 MHz
* Processing power (single precision): 104 GigaFLOPS
* Polygon throughput: 650M polygons/sec
* Data fetch rate (32-bit): 20.8 billion fetches/sec
* Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 5.2 Gigatexels/sec
* Pixel fill rate: 2.6 Gigapixels/sec
* Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 10.4 Gigasamples/sec
* Memory clock speed: 400 MHz DDR2 and up to 800 MHz DDR3
* Memory data rate: 0.8 Gbps DDR2 and up to 1.6 Gbps DDR3
* Memory bandwidth: 6.4 GB/sec (DDR2) and up to 12.8 GB/sec (DDR3)
* Typical power: 19.1Watts
* Idle power: 6.4Watts

In the next few months, both Intel and AMD are slated to release the industry’s first six-core processors for desktop PCs. Chip makers are pitching these multi-core chips for multi-tasking and multimedia, but real-world consumer applications for six CPU cores remain limited, and for now these are likely to appeal only to PC enthusiasts with deep pockets.

Despite not offering any new features or mind blowing performance, the AMD Athlon II X4 635 is a solid product. It was able to keep up with both the Phenom II 940BE and the Phenom II 910e in just about all of the benchmarks performed today. Pair the Athlon II X4 635 with a motherboard like the MSI 785GM-E65 and for a little over $200.00 you can have a solid base for great computer. Not bad, considering the system would support dual-monitors, Blu-Ray playback, GPGPU applications like stream and most importantly it would be ready for Windows 7.

Months after the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series (known by the "Evergreen" family codename) was introduced, AMD has finally pushed out the first bits of open-source code. This morning if you are to checkout the xf86-video-ati DDX driver branch there is initial user-space mode-setting support for the Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs. The ATI kernel mode-setting support that we really care about these days is also about done, but it isn't yet published. The open-source ATI driver currently offers no 2D (EXA) acceleration and the 3D support either through a classic Mesa driver or Gallium3D also is not yet available.