General Processing Units and Technology

Just a quickie this time. AMDs developer page has been updated as of now with the checksums of AMD APP SDK 2.6. The files linked there as of this writing are still 2.5, but if you alter the link to point to 2.6 instead of the linked SDK, you get the brand new APP SDK 2.6. But please try and visit their site first - they should have updated it any minute now. In a blog-entry from a couple of days ago, AMDs Mark Ireton apart from revealing today's launch date for the 2.6 SDK, already outlined some of the changes, AMD APP 2.6 will bring. Most notably, Open CL 1.2 will be on the support list for 2012 where AMD is commited to fully support the most important open GPU-Compute standard on both CPUs and GPUs. The APP SDK 2.6 is to include previews on some of OpenCL 1.2's core features according to AMD.
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After last month's very late release of Catalyst 11.10, the November issue of AMDs Radeon graphics drivers, Catalyst 11.11 WHQL is available for download already. AMD also issued the first Catalyst Application Profile, short CAP, for 11.11 release, which adds tweaks for the Battlefield 3 profile in Crossfire multi-GPU configurations, improves Crossfire performance for Global Ops: Commando Lybia and disables Crossfire - probably there have been issues - for Driver San Francisco.
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With the official launch of Cedar Trail's desktop variants D2700 and D2500 just a few days ago, more and more details about the (ultra) mobile processor based on Intels Atom mircoarchitecture are starting to appear.

While you can read about the chip's 1.86 to 2.13 GHz frequency, their 42 - 52 Dollar price, their 32nm manufacturing, their NM10 chipset and similar basics elsewhere, I am going to concentrate on some peculiar facts that either just surfaced or were confirmed through Intels data sheet for Intel's D2000 and N2000 series of Atom processors: The missing DirectX 10.1 support, (almost) no power management for the IGP or the limited video decoding support.
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Catalyst 11.10 WHQL is finally available and it is the first official driver release for Radeon graphics cards after the final version of this years' most anticipated game, Battlefield 3, came out. Strangely enough, Battlefield 3 is nowhere mentioned throughout the release notes, which you can review for yourself here or use the attached version below (Updated, see below!). AMDs Andrew Dodd, going by the name of CatalystCreator in the microblogging service twitter, recommends to use Catalyst 11.9 CAP4 after installing Catalyst 11.10 WHQL. Catalyst Application Profiles or CAP for short, are linked below as well. He goes on to say, that Catalyst 11.10 WHQL contains the same fixes as are present in the earlier Catalyst 11.10 Preview v3 drivers.
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AMDs Catalyst driver 11.9 WHQL is out and actually preceding it, AMDs Catalyst 11.10 Preview was made available for the Battlefield 3 (Open) Beta. While the former is mostly a welcomed bugfixing driver, the latter brings some changes with it - not counting the performance improvements for the Battlefield 3 Open Beta currently underway.

The Catalyst 11.9 WHQL driver adds support for some DisplayPort panels in AMDs Stereo API HD3D and apart from that is not very spectacular. It installed without a hitch on my freshly set-up Phenom II system coming from the 11.8 WHQL and features a nice list of improvements with regard to functionality and bugfixes rather than performance improvements. Those seem to be reserverd for the 11.10 driver as the preview version made available for the Battlefield 3 Beta (did I mention it already?) brings some of them along with a few new GUI elements, namely in the Overdrive, CrossfireX and Information Center sections. But first things first.
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Nvidia has a long history of selling older technology under a new and shiny name to make it more compelling to the less informed customer. The most recent example is the Geforce 405, a supposedly OEM-only model, that is using apparently a GT218-like chip and is not even capable of the same API-level features that Nvidia hypes about it's namesakes of the Geforce 400 series, namely Tessellation, Compute Shader 5.0 and the whole rest of DirectX 11 exclusive technology.

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