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Sulon offers a peek at a true all-in-one VR headset
The ideal virtual reality headset doesn't need anything else to work its magic: no wires, no tracking sensors, no smartphones. That's been largely elusive, but Sulon Technologies thinks it's on the cusp of making this work. It just provided a sneak peek at the Sulon Q, a VR and augmented reality headset that operates entirely on its own. It combines a quad HD OLED display with AMD computing hardware (an FX-8800P chip with Radeon R7 graphics), audio and spatial processing to do everything you need on your noggin. In theory, you only have to don this Windows-based device to start wandering virtual worlds -- and you won't get caught up in cabling while you're at it.
Jon Fingas03.14.2016
AMD's new graphics core is built for laptop gaming
For all the talk of fast graphics in thin laptops, the technology isn't quite there yet. You typically have to choose between a bulky gaming machine and a thin system with pokey low-end video. AMD thinks it might have the cure, however. It just offered a peek at a new graphics architecture, Polaris, that promises gaming-grade performance without the power draw. In Star Wars Battlefront, one of AMD's future chipsets is 61 percent more energy-efficient than a GeForce GTX 950 with similar performance -- in the mobile world, that could make the difference between a slim portable and a big desktop replacement. Even if AMD is cherry-picking the results, this could still lead to speedier visual in laptops and any other small PCs where heat and power are problems.
Jon Fingas01.04.2016
AMD's flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card now available for $549
AMD's range-topping Radeon R9 290X has been (officially) shrouded in mystery since its unveiling last month, but the company is at last revealing full details and releasing the graphics card to stores. As you'd expect given its $549 price, the flagship is a big leap in performance over the $299 R9 280X: it carries 2,816 stream processors, a wider 512-bit memory bus and a larger 4GB of video RAM. The board can muster 5.6TFLOPs of general computing power, AMD says, and is built with 4K graphics in mind. More importantly, it's also delivering a lot of bang for the buck. Early reviews at sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware show the R9 290X outperforming the more expensive GeForce GTX 780; as long as you can tolerate the noisier cooling, it may be a good fit for your gaming PC.
Jon Fingas10.24.2013AMD unveils Radeon R9 and R7 series video cards, unifying graphics code for PCs and consoles
Graphics cards aren't normally our go-to choices for audio processing, but we may have to make exceptions for AMD's just-unveiled Radeon R9 and R7 lines. The R9 290X (shown above), R9 290 and R7 260X (after the break) will support TrueAudio, a new programmable pipeline that enables advanced audio effects without burdening a PC's main processor or a dedicated sound card. Not that the range will be lacking in visual prowess, of course. While the company isn't revealing full specifications, it claims that the R9 290X flagship will have five teraflops of total computing power versus the four teraflops of the previous generation. The boards will ship sometime in the "near future," with prices ranging from $89 for an entry R7 250 to $299 for the mid-tier R9 280X. AMD isn't divulging the R9 290X's price, but pre-orders for the card will start on October 3rd. The firm has also revealed a new programming interface, Mantle, that makes the most of the Graphics Core Next architecture found in many of its recent processors and video chipsets. Developers who build the low-level code into their games should get better performance from GCN-based devices without having to re-optimize for each platform -- a title meant for Radeon-equipped PCs should still behave well on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, for instance. Mantle will debut on Windows through a December update to Battlefield 4, and should spread to other platforms in the months ahead.
Jon Fingas09.25.2013
AMD's 2014 embedded roadmap includes dedicated graphics, gaming-friendly CPU
AMD has long signaled that embedded chips will play a major role in its future, and it's backing up that claim by providing a glance at its 2014 roadmap. The highlight is Bald Eagle, a 35-watt x86 processor designed for demanding tasks like gaming; it should include up to four Steamroller cores, and it will optionally sport on-chip Graphics Core Next video. Devices that need even more visual power will use Adelaar, a dedicated graphics chipset that includes both GCN and 2GB of built-in memory. It's reportedly fast enough to be useful for PC video cards, not just the usual set-top boxes and smart TVs. Two system-on-chip designs are also joining AMD's lineup. Hierofalcon is built with data centers in mind, and carries up to eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores; Steppe Eagle, meanwhile, is a combination of upgraded Jaguar x86 cores and GCN that should speed up AMD's low-power G-series processors. With the exception of Hierofalcon, all of the new embedded chips should be available in the first half of next year. AMD hasn't named any early customers, but its embedded silicon tends to reach products that you'd recognize. Check out the roadmap after the break.
Jon Fingas09.10.2013
AMD details Elite Mobility and mainstream APUs, we run early tests (hands-on)
AMD has been willing to tease its 2013 ultra-mobile APU (accelerated processing unit) strategy through PCs like the Acer Aspire V5, but today it's spilling the beans in earnest. The headliner for many is the company's just-shipping Elite Mobility line, or Temash: the A4 and A6 designs are built for tablets, like Hondo was, but their Jaguar-based system-on-chip designs should be faster in both CPU and graphics power without a hit to battery life. AMD estimates that the Radeon HD 8280G video core in an Elite Mobility A6 is about five times faster than a Clover Trail-based Atom and twice as fast as Hondo, but lasts about 45 percent longer on battery than an Intel Core i3. And that's while untethered -- that Turbo Dock feature is still in place to boost speeds by over 30 percent when a dock is around for extra cooling. The E1, E2, A4 and A6 mainstream APUs based on Kabini, meanwhile, are all about tackling the Pentium and Core i3 chips that go into entry-level laptops. AMD reckons that the dual-core (E-series) and quad-core (A-series) parts are up to 88 percent faster overall than their ancestors, and can even punch above their weight class: the E1's Radeon HD 8000-level graphics are up to 66 percent faster than those of a much thirstier, Trinity-era A4 chip. Battery life is a specialty as well, with up to 10 hours when idle and 9 hours of web use. That's typically 2 to 3 hours more than Kabini's Brazos ancestor could manage. AMD wasn't specific on when these mainstream APUs would first ship when we were briefed, but we had the opportunity to benchmark an A4-based reference laptop. Read on past the break for the scores and some early impressions. %Gallery-189169% %Gallery-189171%
Jon Fingas05.23.2013
AMD unveils Radeon HD 8900M laptop graphics, ships them in MSI's GX70 (eyes-on)
Did you think AMD showed all its mobile GPU cards when it launched the Radeon HD 8000M series in January? Think twice. The company has just unveiled the 8900M series, an adaptation of its Graphics Core Next architecture for desktop replacement-class gaming laptops. To call it a big jump would be an understatement: compared to the 8800M, the flagship 8970M chip doubles the stream processors to 1,280, hikes the clock speed from 725MHz to 850MHz and bumps the memory speed slightly to 1.2GHz. The net effect is about 12 to 54 percent faster game performance than NVIDIA's current mobile speed champion, the GTX 680M, and up to four times the general computing prowess in OpenCL. The 8970M is more than up to the task of powering up to 4K in one screen, and it can handle up to six screens if there are enough ports. We'll see how long AMD's performance reign lasts, although we won't have to wait to try the 8970M -- MSI is launching the GPU inside the new GX70 laptop you see above. We got a brief, hands-off tease of the 17.3-inch GX60 successor at the 8900M's unveiling, and it's clear the graphics are the centerpiece. We saw it driving Crysis 3 very smoothly on one external display while powering 2D on two other screens, albeit through a bulky set of Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA cables. Otherwise, the GX70 is superficially similar to its ancestor with that chunky profile, an unnamed Richland-based AMD A10 processor, Killer networking and a SteelSeries keyboard. More than anything, price should be the clincher: MSI is pricing the GX70 with the new Radeon at $1,100, which amounts to quite the bargain for anyone whose laptop has to double as a primary gaming PC. %Gallery-188363% %Gallery-188362%
Jon Fingas05.15.2013
AMD Radeon HD 8000 series GPUs official for laptops, desktop series now shipping to OEMs
Most of the secrets surrounding AMD's latest series of mobile graphics chips have been known for a while now, but that didn't stop the company from making everything official today. Intended for traditional laptops and ultrathins alike, the Radeon HD 8000M series supports DirectX 11.1 and stands as the first of the company's mobile GPUs to incorporate the AMD Graphics Core Next architecture. The lineup consists of the Radeon HD 8800M, HD 8700M, HD 8600M and HD 8500M. The chip manufacturer announced that the Radeon HD 8000M series has already been incorporated into products from ASUS and Samsung -- no surprises here -- and also let it be known that we can expect similar offerings from Dell, Lenovo and other OEMs in short order. Rounding out the GPU announcements from AMD, the company also took the opportunity to crow that its Radeon HD 8000 series for desktops is now en route to OEM partners. What's more, we can expect desktop rigs with this technology to begin arriving on store shelves later this month. If you're thirsty for more information, feel free to soak up the PR after the break. Follow all the latest CES 2013 news at our event hub.
Zachary Lutz01.07.2013
Engadget Primed: The crazy science of GPU compute
Primed goes in-depth on the technobabble you hear on Engadget every day -- we dig deep into each topic's history and how it benefits our lives. You can follow the series here. Looking to suggest a piece of technology for us to break down? Drop us a line at primed *at* engadget *dawt* com. As you're hopefully aware, this is a gadget blog. As a result, we're innately biased towards stuff that's new and preferably fandangled. More cores, more pixels, more lenses; just give it here and make us happy. The risk of this type of technological greed is that we don't make full use of what we already have, and nothing illustrates that better than the Graphics Processing Unit. Whether it sits in our desktops, laptops, tablets or phones, the GPU is cruelly limited by its history -- its long-established reputation as a dumb, muscular component that takes instructions from the main processor and translates them into pixels for us to gawp at. But what if the GPUs in our devices had some buried genius -- abilities that, if only we could tap into them, would yield hyper-realistic experiences and better all-round performance from affordable hardware? Well, the thing is, this hidden potential actually exists. We've been covering it since at least 2008 and, even though it still hasn't generated enough fuss to become truly famous, the semiconductor industry is making more noise about it now than ever before. So please, join us after the break as we endeavor to explain why the trend known as "GPU compute," aka "general purpose GPU (GPGPU)," or simply "not patronizing your graphics processor," is still exciting despite having let us down in the past. We'll try to show why it's worth learning a few related concepts and terms to help provide a glossary for future coverage; and why, on the whole, your graphics chip is less Hasselhoff and more Hoffman than you may have imagined.
Sharif Sakr08.20.2012
AMD announces Radeon HD 7000M series with Enduro graphics-switching technology
AMD kicked off 2012 by refreshing its desktop graphics, and now it's back, giving its mobile GPUs the same treatment. The company just announced its third generation of DirectX 11 mobile chips, the Radeon HD 7000 family. All told, the collection includes three 28nm GPUs: the high-end 7900M, the mainstream 7800M and, last but not least, the 7700M, a darling little chip intended for AMD's thin and light Ultrabook competitors. Across the board, the series ushers in a new feature AMD is calling Enduro, a graphics-switching technology that takes direct aim at NVIDIA Optimus. Building on older AMD technologies like PowerXpress, it doesn't require you to close apps, reboot your system or manually specify which apps will trigger the GPU. Additionally, it's designed to work with both Intel CPUs and AMD's own application processing units, so presumably you'll find this inside some Ivy Bridge machines too. With this generation, too, the two higher-end chips support the PCI Express 3.0 interface, and all three make use of AMD's existing ZeroCore Power and Power Gating battery-saving features. That's the abridged version, but we also have a full breakdown of the specs awaiting you past the break.
Dana Wollman04.24.2012