AMD has released their 13.2 beta Catalyst driver which not only imporoves performance in Crysis 3 beta, but also with DMC and Crysis 2.  It also addresses the issues raised in the Tech Report article with frame latency in Skyrim, Borderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2.

· Improves performance up to 15% in high MSAA cases for the Crysis 3 beta release
o Future updates will be made to AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta to further improve performance in Crysis 3 for both single GPU and CrossFire configurations
· Significantly improves latency performance in Skyrim, Boderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2
· Improves single GPU performance up to 50% for DmC Devil May Cry
· Improves CrossFire performance up to 10% for Crysis 2
· Resolves Texture flickering seen in DirectX9.0c applications.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —1/22/2013 

Q4 2012 Results

AMD revenue $1.16 billion, decreased 9 percent sequentially and 32 percent year-over-year
Gross margin 15 percent, non-GAAP1 gross margin 39 percent
Operating loss of $422 million, net loss of $473 million, loss per share of $0.63
Non-GAAP1 operating loss of $55 million, net loss of $102 million, loss per share of $0.14
2012 Annual Results

AMD revenue $5.42 billion, down 17 percent year-over-year
Gross margin 23 percent, non-GAAP1 gross margin 41 percent
Operating loss of $1.06 billion, net loss of $1.18 billion, loss per share $1.60
Non-GAAP1 operating income of $45 million, net loss of $114 million, loss per share $0.16
AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2012 of $1.16 billion, an operating loss of $422 million, and a net loss of $473 million, or $0.63 per share. The company reported a non-GAAP operating loss of $55 million and a non-GAAP net loss of $102 million, or $0.14 per share.

For the year ended December 29, 2012, AMD reported revenue of $5.42 billion, an operating loss of $1.06 billion and a net loss of $1.18 billion, or $1.60 per share. The full year non-GAAP operating income was $45 million and non-GAAP net loss was $114 million, or $0.16 per share.

“AMD continues to evolve our operating model and diversify our product portfolio with the changing PC environment,” said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. “Innovation is the core of our long-term growth. The investments we are making in technology today are focused on leveraging our distinctive IP to drive growth in ultra low power client devices, semi-custom SoCs and dense servers. We expect to deliver differentiated and groundbreaking APUs to our customers in 2013 and remain focused on transforming our operating model to the business realities of today.”

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Industry Veterans Matar, Meretsky will Help Drive AMD’s Software Intellectual Property Development and the Evolution of System-on-Chip Solutions

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —1/23/2013
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Charles Matar and Wayne Meretsky have joined the company to assume critical new engineering leadership roles driving hardware and software intellectual property (IP) development for AMD’s system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. Matar will draw upon his expertise in SoC and processor design to lead AMD’s SoC methodology and client SoC execution. Meretsky will lead the company’s software development, ensuring tools will be in place that will enable developers to take advantage of the compute power in AMD’s SoC designs.

“Charles and Wayne will serve as key members of our engineering brain trust, bringing with them years of expertise in SoC design and developing 64-bit software ecosystems, respectively,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD Chief Technology Officer. “The fact that these computing experts have returned to the company underscores AMD’s unique position and opportunity, based on differentiated IP, to take a leadership position in low-power clients and dense cloud servers.”

Charles Matar, named corporate vice president of SoC Development, will serve as a crucial force behind AMD’s SoC solutions. Joining AMD from Qualcomm, Matar combines technical expertise in SoC processor and low-power design with a proven track record of consistently introducing new designs in advanced process technology nodes. With experience leading multidiscipline, global teams in delivering SoC designs and embedded processors from definition through silicon, he will employ his in-depth understanding of market trends and wireless industry requirements to help AMD shift appropriate focus to client and embedded market opportunities. Prior to Qualcomm, Matar held engineering roles at Motorola, Rockwell Semiconductor, HAL Computer Systems, PMC-Sierra and helped to develop AMD’s K8 processor family.

Meretsky, named corporate vice president, Software IP Development, will lead software development for all of AMD’s products. Meretsky is a former AMD Fellow who was instrumental in making AMD’s 64-bit technology the de facto industry standard for PCs, workstations and servers. He has more than 25 years of development and management experience in the creation of high-volume technology products and has held leadership roles at Rational, Apple and P.A. Semi. In addition to his technical contributions, Meretsky has a strong track record of managing high-performance teams that will help ensure developers, technology partners and customers are fully aligned with AMD’s software strategy. Meretsky is also a former P.A. Semi colleague of Jim Keller, whose appointment as AMD’s Chief Architect was announced in August 2012.

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AMD Awarded Two “Eggies” at Newegg’s Second Annual Eggie Awards during the 2013 International CES Show in Las Vegas

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —1/24/2013 
AMD (NYSE: AMD) was awarded two Eggies at Newegg’s second annual Eggie Awards on Jan. 10, 2013 at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. AMD won Best Merchandising Campaign for its unique “Never Settle” graphics marketing program, and John Torres, Sales Account Manager at AMD, was awarded an EggXellence Award for outstanding individual contribution to the business.

“This award underscores our commitment to delivering the best experience for our customers through highly acclaimed merchandising programs,” said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, AMD Channel Sales. “The ‘Never Settle’ campaign is the natural outcome of a company committed to technical excellence.”

The “Never Settle” marketing campaign was launched in October 2012, and is the ultimate expression of AMD’s Gaming Evolved program — collaborating with the world’s top developers, delivering exciting graphics technologies and working closely with AMD sales partners. The campaign featured a promotional giveaway of four of the world’s top PC games with the purchase of AMD’s world-class AMD Radeon™ graphics cards. CES 2013 also saw the launch of the AMD Radeon™ HD 8800M, HD 8700M, HD 8600M and HD 8500M graphics processing units (GPUs.)

“On behalf of Newegg, I congratulate AMD for winning two 2012 Eggie Awards,” said Soren Mills, chief marketing officer of Newegg North America. “We value AMD as a partner and wish to thank the company for its outstanding contributions to our business in 2012. We look forward to continuing our successful partnership in 2013.”

Newegg acknowledges outstanding contributions made by vendor partners and customers at their annual Eggie Awards at CES each year. This year, Newegg recognized 26 award recipients across 14 categories.

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AMD is a Founding Member of GizmoSphere Embedded Developer Community

SUNNYVALE, Calif. —1/24/2013
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that the newly launched Gizmo board, a low-cost board geared toward x86-based embedded system development available from GizmoSphere, is powered by an AMD Embedded G-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). Gizmo is a 4-inch by 4-inch x86 development board that can run a variety of operating systems including Android, Linux®, RTOSes and Windows®. AMD is a founding member of GizmoSphere, a not-for-profit organization whose collective goal is to drive and enable technology projects of interest to independent developers, with a focus on stimulating and encouraging innovation around multicore heterogeneous computing using APUs.

The Gizmo board includes the G-T40E dual-core processor running at 1.0 GHz, combined on a single die with AMD Radeon™ HD 6250 discrete-class graphics. The board provides a performance capacity of 52 gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) at less than 10 watts. Custom high- and low-speed edge connectors enable a full range of functions. This unprecedented level of integration between serial and parallel processing offers a power-efficient foundation for high-performance multimedia content delivery across a broad range of embedded designs such as digital signage, x86 set-top box (xSTB), IP-TV, thin client, information kiosk, point-of-sale, casino gaming, media servers and industrial control systems.

“Gizmo is an excellent board for the next generation of embedded systems development,” said Kamal Khouri, director of Embedded Products, AMD. “The new board will serve the diverse and growing embedded development community and is especially useful for those wanting to incorporate the advanced capabilities possible by harnessing a heterogeneous architecture. Developers ready to take advantage of a high-performance, full I/O-featured x86 development board will find tremendous value in Gizmo.”

Packaged as part of a development kit, the Gizmo board is available now through GizmoSphere.org for $199. GizmoSphere’s founding members include AMD, Sage Electronic Engineering, Texas Multicore Technologies and Viosoft.

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Tweaktown-Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT (Tahiti LE) 2GB with Boost Overclocked Video Card Review

Having a look at the box there's nothing too new. You can actually see we're dealing with the typical HD 7870 box with just a sticker that gives it the new name which has the XT label tagged onto the end. The biggest problem is that we don't really know this card is based on the new Tahiti LE core. This was the same issue we noted with the PowerColor version that we looked at previously.

ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 (AMD A85X) Motherboard Review

A month on, though, we've got some new boards and some updated BIOS's to play around with. We wonder if anything has changed in that time. We've seen some amazing numbers come out of the latest AMD CPU's when it comes to pure speed, but they're all based on extreme LN2 cooling. Today we'll take the time to check out an ASRock FM2 offering in the form of the FM2A85X Extreme6 motherboard.

HIS HD 7970 IceQ X² & HD 7950 IceQ X² Review

For this review, we will be looking at HIS’s HD 7970 GHz Edition IceQ X² and HD 7950 Boost Clock IceQ X². They remain at AMD’s reference clock speeds and instead rely upon offering excellent overclocking headroom and some advanced cooling features to justify a slight premium. Now, HIS does sell an overclocked version of the HD 7970 GHz Edition which uses the “Turbo” moniker but we decided to focus upon two more affordable alternatives.

PowerColor Radeon HD 7950 3GB PCS Overclocked Video Card Review

We'll move from here into the package to see what PowerColor is offering us on the box along with its content. Once we've done that it's onto the video card itself to see the cooler we've got along with the connection options before we move onto the specification side of things which today will be slightly expanded as we've decided to overclock this card. Finally we'll check out the testbed and get straight into the testing side of things to see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the card here today. First, though, let's get into that package and see what's going on.

AMD has posted up a number of items from their CES 2013 activities incluing blogs, videos, and their press conference.  

AMD is taking experiential computing to the next level in the AMD Experience Zone at CES and this site is your destination for inside access to all the action. This year AMD is kicking off CES early with a press conference and digital engagers event on January 7th 

Make sure to come back here for exclusive access to our live press conference January 7th at 4pm PST. This site is also your pass to videos of SurRoundHouse, photos from all of our CES events and your chance to hear about the latest technologies coming from AMD.

GamesIndustry.biz compares the upcoming Playstation 4 to a Radeon HD 7970 in performance.  I'm very skeptical of that, but indeed the new all AMD PS4 and Xbox 720 will be more powerful, but are already almost a year behind the PC in performance and might be just under a year from launch.  Maybe.  After seeing the complete lie that was the PS3 booth at CES back before launch I have a hard time believing anything Sony says.  The most important part here is will this help AMD in game optimization on the PC.  Will octo core finally take off?  Much was speculated when Intel stole the original Xbox win from AMD about that.  This time around Intel is looking from the outside in focusing instead on phones.  Blah. 

Married to the eight-core processor, Orbis also features Radeon HD graphics hardware. We've previously suggested that AMD's mobile "Pitcairn" design - the Radeon 7970M - could be a strong basis for a next-gen console graphics core in terms of power consumption and die-size. Running at 850MHz and featuring 20 of AMD's "Graphics Core Next" compute units, our information suggests that Orbis shaves off 10 per cent of that number, offering up 18 CUs in total, and sees a mild downclock to 800MHz. Incorporated into a design dedicated to cutting-edge visuals and gameplay, this hardware has some serious potential.

AMD has released their 13.2 Catalyst drivers today.  They include all of the improvements from the 12.11 beta drivers.

AMD Catalyst 13.1 features a newly designed 3D application settings page, allow users to more easily adjust and control their 3D settings on a per application basis.

Rage 3D- His Radeon HD 7970 IceQ X2

HIS recently launched a new Radeon HD 7970 model, based on the GHz Edition specification but with a new dual-fan heatsink and tweaked for overclocking. The HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition IceQ X2 features additional power input capacity in the form of dual 8-pin PCI-e power inputs and a custom cooling design. It launched alongside AMD's Never Settle bundle to give holiday season shoppers the most incentive to team Red - if you're in the market for the fastest single GPU card. The Never Settle bundle is still in effect, although the Medal of Honor: Warfighter discount has now expired.

Hardware Heaven-EVGA GeForce GTX 670 FTW Signature 2 versus ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

We will be taking EVGA's latest GTX 670, the FTW Signature 2 Edition and putting it head to head with the ASUS 7970 DirectCU2 to find out how each performs in games such as Far Cry 3, Assassins Creed and Hitman Absolution. Of course this will all be real world gaming and the usual GPU computing, media and power/thermal testing will be thrown in too. So lets get started...

Tech Powerup-VTX3D HD 7870 Black Edition 2 GB

Towards late-November last year, AMD made a halfhearted attempt at launching a new performance-segment GPU that strikes a price-point right in between the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and the Radeon HD 7950, and that's putting it mildly. There was confusion over specifications and name until the very last minute. AMD finally decided not to make a reference-design card which left the decision to its partners, most of whom decided against releasing the SKU so as not to disturb their swelling HD 7870 GHz Edition and HD 7950 inventories. To make matters worse, AMD chose the brilliant SKU name of "Radeon HD 7870".

Tweaktown-HIS Radeon HD 7970 3GB IceQ X2 Overclocked Video Card Review

As we start a new year it's time to get back into the swing of things and the first video card to be tested this side of 2013 comes from HIS who sent us a bunch of cards before the new year. The latest is one of our favorite models, the HD 7970 3GB, which has served us extremely well for over a year now when it launched last January.