Tech Report and Anandtech try to figure out what is going on with the 8000 series Radeons or Sea Islands.  

As for enthusiasts, the implication that they’re not going to see anything faster than Tahiti until the next generation products at the end of this year is unfortunately unlikely to go over well. Enthusiasts have become used to annual GPU refreshes, and while they’re still somewhat here as we’re seeing with Sea Islands, that era appears to be coming to a close as microarchitectures improve, development costs go up, and the rate of introduction for new fabrication processes slows. And certainly this is quite a departure from the norm. But if nothing else, AMD is right about a couple of things: as it stands AMD is already competitive with NVIDIA’s contemporary high-end offerings, and they're finally competitive with NVIDIA when it comes to developer outreach. Ultimately with the success of the 7900 series AMD today is in a comfortable place, leaving them free to focus on what they already have and how to improve those sales even further.

Tech Report covers the Common Platform Technology Forum.  It is the gathering of Globalfoundries, IBM, and Samsung where they talk about the future of fab processes.  

One thing we don't know is how GlobalFoundries' highest-profile customer will take advantage of this new process tech. With the changes in leadership at AMD has come a more conservative approach to both roadmap disclosures and process technology transitions. All we know at present is that the next-generation "Kaveri" APU, successor the Trinity and Richland and competitor to Ivy Bridge, is slated for 28-nm production late in 2013. Several of AMD's other products, including the low-power "Temash" APU and the "Sea Islands" graphics chips, will be manufactured by TSMC at 28 nm. We'd expect future Opteron and FX processors to make the transition to 20LPM or 14XM at GlobalFoundries, but neither AMD nor GloFo is willing to talk about specifics.

Fudo reports that Global Foundries will be pushing out their 10nm process sometime in 2015.

By the end of the year Globalfoundries plans to start churning out 20nm LPM parts for wired applications and networking. In 2014 we should see the first hybrid 14nm XM (extreme mobility) parts, which combine 14nm FinFET transistors and 20nm back-end-of-line (BEOL). A 10nm hybrid process, utilizing 10nm FinFET with 14nm BEOL, is planned for 2015.

Fudo discusses AMD' sweep of the next gen graphics in all of the consoles, and wonder whether that will increase their luck in the PC market as well.

Nvidia still thinks that it owns the PC gaming market, but it will be interesting to see if AMD can make a bigger comeback in 2013. The vibe from many AMD executives we talked to over the last few weeks is that graphics will become the focus and they want to be a bit more aggressive in this field.

Fudo reports that AMD spent 4 million dollars on the Far Cry 3 bundles.

Our sources claim that it took AMD $4 million to secure the Never Settle and Never Settle Reloaded bundle for its high end customers. Currently AMD offers the Never Settle Reloaded for its new HD 7900 customers that can get Crysis 3 and BioShock Infinite for free.

 The Futurelooks AMD A85 Series FM2 Motherboard Round Up Featuring ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI

AMD brought their newest Piledriver architecture to their APU chips first with the release of Trinity. We have already looked at the Trinity chips themselves, so lets take a better look at the motherboards designed to support them. Today, our AMD A10-5800K APU will be paired with three great FM2 socket motherboards with three leading manufacturers and we’ve selected the MSi FM2-A85XA-G65, GIGABYTE GA-F2A85X-UP4, and ASUS F2A85-V PRO. May the best board win!

Legit Reviews-BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85W Motherboard Review

Giving the Specifications a quick look through, we can see that the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W motherboard supports all AMD socket FM2 APUs. We also can see that this motherboard can handle up to 64GBs of memory that is rated up to 2400MHz (Overclocked). As far as the PCI-E/PCI expansion ports, this motherboard only supports up to a 16 X 4x configuration on two full length PCI-E VGA expansion ports; what this means is that we will not be able to run a fully compliant AMD Crossfire configuration, but you will still be able to run AMD Crossfire configuration; just your mileage will vary greatly. The Audio that is being used on this motherboard is from Realtek. In the past this audio chip has provided with decent high quality sound. The South Bridge is fully compliant with all SATA ports to fully support SATA 6GB/s interfacing, unlike Intel's ability of only supporting up two SATA 6GB/s storage interfacing ports. The only other thing I am going to touch base on is the limited number of USB 3.0 ports; this particular board can only use up to four total USB 3.0 ports.

PureOC-ECS A85F2-A Golden Motherboard Review

When it comes to using this new processing power, it’s also important to choose the right motherboard that fits the bill. The APU line of motherboards were designed to be affordable, but also offer high performance standards. Today we are going to be looking at a new motherboard from ECS: the A85F2-A Golden Motherboard. This motherboard will follow its A85X (hudson D4) chipset. ECS doesn’t call this board the “Golden” board for no reason, and, as we take a closer look, you will see why.

Legit Reviews-ASUS ARES II Video Card Review

If you are looking for a new gaming graphics card and money is not an issue, you are in for a real treat today! ASUS recently sent over the ASUS ARES II and we have been pounding on this card for days on end. In case you haven't heard about the ARES II, you are missing out. The ARES II is what happens when you take two overclocked AMD Radeon HD 7970 'Tahaiti' GPU's and let the engineers over at ASUS do what they do best without and budget restrictions. After seven months of work, ASUS has launched the ARES II and hopes to take the performance crown when it comes to the fastest video card in the world.

AMD has released the Catalyst 13.2 Beta 5 driver here.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE AMD CATALYST 13.2 BETA 5 DRIVER

Crysis 3 multi-player Beta: Improves CrossFire scaling by up to 40%
Far Cry 3: Improves performance up to 10% at 2560x1600 with 8xAA
New 3D Mark release: Adds CrossFire profile support for the new 3D Mark release under Windows 8

Techpowerup believes AMD is working on new GPU dynamic overclocking technology after looking at documents for their AMD Display Library.

The technology we believe AMD to be experimenting with could follow a method more similar to NVIDIA's GPU Boost. There are no definite clock speeds, but ranges, and the boost clock algorithm instructs the driver to alter clock speeds taking into account load, power draw, and temperatures. Close reading of the API documents also reveal that AMD is working on a dynamic boosting technology for the memory clocks, something that's currently not possible on NVIDIA's products. With AMD GPUs, applying a memory overclock no longer cause the screen to flicker (at least not noticeably).

AMD has announced that their 2013 developer summit will be held in San Jose in mid November which is a change from Bellevue from June.

For the third consecutive year, AMD invites computing innovators, developers and researchers in the rapidly growing field of heterogeneous computing to submit their latest work and research findings in the form of archival presentations for AMD’s annual developer summit. Chosen presenters will have an opportunity to share their breakthrough research findings, software advances and innovative applications with summit attendees while garnering support for industry standards, and networking with technical leaders, developers and academics that will help advance the adoption of this rapidly developing and game changing technology.

Tbreak has taken launch and latest driver releases for the Radeon HD 7970 and the GeForce GTX 680 and compared how performance has changed.

As you can see both the AMD HD 7970 and the NVIDIA GTX 680 perform on par, my guess being that the HD 7970 GHz Edition will outperform the GTX 680 in F1 2012, Battlefield 3 and Civilization V. However, none of these would be meaningful performance bumps as anything beyond 60fps is only for boasting, unless you have a monitor running at 120Hz refresh rate. Even then, though, actual performance benefits are arguable for most competitive games.