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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Modern processors, be they of CPU, GPU, APU or SoC flavour, employ very sophisticated power management techniques in order to better leverage the full potential of their respective functional units in combination with the applied thermal solution. What sounds quite basic is indeed a multi-dimensional topic and can easily mess with any performance analysis that is not taking into account the specifics in each processor. In this article I am giving an outline what contributes to the power management in modern processors.

A while ago - in IT-time quite an eternity - processors had a certain clock speed which they maintained during all operations. They had a fixed TDP that defined the necessary cooling solutions' capabilities to the fraction of a watt. Of course, power was quite low compared to more recent devices in the desktop space. Mobile devices, being much more dependant on a low power consumption, employed simple techniques like a reduced state for clock speed and core voltage as early as the turn of the millenium. With more recent devices, power has become a much more important issue in more than one respect - even in the desktop space. ...

AMDs has put up it's Catalyst drivers 11.8 WHQL up for download. This time, they feature some nice performance improvements for DirectX 11 titles like Crysis 2 (up to 10 percent improved framerate) and F.E.A.R. 3 (up to 8 percent higher fps) as well as being up to 30% faster when performing AMDs Morphological Antialiasing.[Update: CAP3 provides many more game profiles, including crossfire improvements for Max Payne 3 - obviously nearing it's release.]
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After having read through this article by german it-site golem.de I tried to have a look at the linked US-patent D642,172 from July 26th 2011, describing a claim for „The ornamental design for an electronic device, as shown and described.” Naturally, I became interested and wanted to have a look at the great piece of art worthy of being protected in such a manner. But alas, I failed! ...

• Slightly off-topic but very important: TTIP leaks
• World's 1st: Xeon Phi KNL with 78 physical cores
• Insightful thoughts about Knights Landing at RWT
• Cuda 6 gives unified memory to developers
• Kaveri coming with 856 GFLOPS at CES 2014
• Geforce GTX 780 Ti launch review #1 (PCGH.de, german)
• Geforce GTX 780 Ti launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• Radeon R9 290X launch review #2 (PCGH.de, german)
• Radeon R9 290X launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• Geforce GTX Titan launch review #1 (PCGH.de, german)
• Geforce GTX Titan launch review #2 (Hardware.fr, french)
• First time ever 2 TFLOPS DP from a single Processor (Youtube)
• Direct link to AMD's Catalyst 13.2 beta5 driver w/CF support for 3DMark ICF



Obviously, this being a one-man-show, I cannot cover everything worth knowing that happens on and off the web. So I keep to a wise line from a probably wise person: „If you can't do your own story, link to it!” And this is what this regularly updated post will be about: Links to interesting articles, downloads, ressources, background and maybe even reviews and videos throughout the web: No bull, no bias, just the facts. ...