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.

Via engadget.com

NVIDIA: there's nothing 'Ultra' about Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks unless you add Kepler

This is a vaguely awkward message for NVIDIA to be putting out. On one hand, the company is best buddies with Intel and is hoping to see its next-gen GPUs bundled with a large portion of the Ivy Bridge notebooks that will ship this year. But to reach that target, it must risk irking Chipzilla by emphasizing the limitations of Ivy Bridge's integrated graphics. That's exactly what happened at a recent presentation, when NVIDIA told us there'll be "nothing Ultra" about the performance of a regular Ivy Bridge Ultrabook because the integrated HD 4000 graphics will only handle around 43 percent of current games.
By contrast, if you add in a GeForce GT 640M you'll find that 100 percent of current games are playable with frame rates over 30fps and high detail settings, including Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Crysis 2 and many others. If you leave the lightweight Ultrabook spec behind and combine Ivy Bridge with a GT 670M GPU then you can go even higher -- as we just discovered in our review of the MSI's GT70 gaming laptop. Fortunately, Intel was pretty magnanimous about HD 4000 when it briefed us, and readily accepted that enthusiasts will still want discrete graphics, so we don't imagine the slide above will cause too many hurt feelings.

Via engadget.com

NVIDIA's GTX 690 rumored to launch by May 5th

A cryptic picture that was posted on NVIDIA's GeForce Facebook page has since been said by a number of sources to be what most were hoping to be the case, a teaser for the next dual-GPU wielding bad boy in the GeForce GTX 690.

sources have informed SweClockers that this SKU is scheduled for an imminent launch and to expect it in the week commencing April 30th, implying it will be launched by May 5th at the latest and April 30th at the earliest. Either way, it also means it would manage to beat out the competition while we await AMD's HD 7990 to arrive.

If the card does launch on April 30th, this would also have it closely follow the launch of Intel's 3rd Gen Ivy Bridge based processors a day earlier.

The GTX 690 comprises dual GK104 GPUs, featuring 3072 CUDA cores and 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Doesn't sound like we'll be waiting much longer at all before full specs and benchmark results are out!

Via http://vr-zone.com

NVIDIA Plots Mobile SoC GPU Performance, Surpassing Xbox 360 by 2014

Qualcomm was the first to tell us that it expects to offer console level GPU performance in the not too distant future, generally hinting that its Adreno 3xx GPUs would get us there. NVIDIA shared this slide (pictured above) with us today that gives its take on where PC, console and mobile GPU performance will land over the coming years. There's nothing too revolutionary here but it does provide an interesting visual for much of what the GPU vendors have been talking about for the past couple of years.

The solid lines are estimated performance, while the dotted lines are trends. According to NVIDIA, somewhere in the 2013 - 2014 timeframe is when we'll get Xbox 360-class GPU performance out of mobile SoCs. The console line only has two points (Xbox 1 and Xbox 360), while the mobile line starts with the original iPhone, moves up to Tegra 2 and then follows Tegra 3.

Via anandtech.com