The Radeon 7700 GPU class graphic cards will be the new bottom line up for gaming PCs from AMD. There are two flavors of the GPU available, the Radeon 7770 and Radeon 7750 with slightly different specifications and prizes.
Both in common is the Cape Verde GPU, fabbed in a 28 nm bulk silicon process by TSMC.
The GPU packs 1.5 * 10^9 transistors on 123 mm² die size. It has up to date interfaces; HDMI 1.4a, Display Port 1.2b on the display side and PCIe 3.0 on the motherboard side.
The memory interface is 128 bit wide and supports standard GDDR5 memory.
The GPU has 10 computing units, organisized in groups up to 4 units with a shared L1 cache and 16 ROPs. Additional there is a common shared 512 KiB L2 cache on die.

On the software side the GPU supports OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL 1.2 with double precision floating point support.

Some parts of the GPU are disabled for the 7750 cards, there is what you will get with 7770 and 7750:

AMD Radeon 7770:

* 1000 MHz graphic clock speed

* 640 Stream Processors

* 40 Texture Units

* 1.28 TFLOPS theoretical computing power

* 1 GiB GDDR5 with 72 GB/s bandwidth

* ~80 watt typical power usage

* 159 $ starting prize

AMD Radeon 7750:

* 800 MHz graphic clock speed

* 512 Stream Processors

* 32 Texture Units

* 0.819 TFLOPS theoretical computing power

* 1 GiB GDDR5 with 72 GB/s bandwidth

* ~50 watt typical power usage

* 109 $ starting prize

AMD did not mentioned when their Catalyst Linux drivers will support the Radeon 7700.

AMD's Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition ...and the Radeon HD 7750, too. @ TheTechReport.com

Driven by the great success of the first online education course last year (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence), the new started company Udacity will start their education program next week. You can still sign up for the first two courses Computer Science 101: Building a Search Engine and Computer Science 373: Programming a Robotic Car. Entering is total free of fees, the course is going over six weeks with a final online exam.
They are done by Prof. David Evans and Prof. Sebastian Thrun.

The Unigine Corp. is finally releasing their debut game Oil Rush today. The game is build around their own in-house Unigine game engine, featuring latest OpenGL 4 eye-candy graphic effects with decent performance.

In the game you will command your troops between different platforms to capture or defend them. The platforms are also your unit construction sites. You will have different kinds of boats and airplanes, but no ground forces, because the hole planet is flooded with water.
New units are build on the captured production platforms, oil rigs are generating your income to buy special enhancements and units. If you move out with all your units, you can still defend your platforms with added gun and missile towers.

Oil Rush features a 16 mission campaign as well as a multiplayer mode. The game can be bought at Desura, Ubuntu Software Center, Unigine Store and in some countries also in a retail DVD box for 20 petro dollars.

AMD has running a cashback promotion in some european states. If you bought an AMD FX processor in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden or the UK from one of the partnered e-tailers, you can get back between 10€ and 20€, depending on the number of cores of your processor.
You will find all the deal details on the AMD promotion webpage. The promotion is running until the end of the month.

Planet 64Bit wishes all readers a Happy New Year 4710!

Have a healthy and successful year of the water dragon and good luck to put all your dreams into reality!

The Humble Introversion Bundle will end in about 20 hours. If you are interested in Uplink, darwinia, DEFCON or Multiwinia, you should grab it now.

For a bonus price, you will also get Aquaria from Bit Blot and Crayon Physics Deluxe from Kloonigames.

After years of hard engineering work, the new Mars Science Laboratory is ready to launch today on the top of an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. The Lift Off is scheduled for 15:02 UTC on 26th November and will be covered live by NASA TV. The launch preparations can be also followed in the launch blog.

Photo: NASA

The world largest LAN party is ongoing this week in Jönköping, Sweden. During DreamHack Winter 2011 there are a bunch of tournaments running. The first rounds were done in the past two days and today is the large Final Saturday.

At 9:00 UTC the Hereos of Newerth finals will start, casted live by Honcast.

The Quake Live TDM finals will be played on the main stage, but the time isn't given yet.

The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is ready for the 29th expedition to the International Space Station. The Soyuz TMA-22 will transport two Russian and one American astronaut and also some regular supply stuff. The Lift-Off of the Soyus rocket is planned for 4:14 UTC from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. A life coverage is streamed by NASA TV.

*edit*

The launch was successful and the Soyuz is now in space on the way to meet the ISS in two days. The docking manoeuvre will also be life coveraged by NASA TV.

Second before the engine starts.

The first stage of the rocket is powered by 5*4 rocket engines.

The empty launch pad in Baikonur after the Lift-Off. The snow on the right side below the pad is burned away.

Inside the TMA-22 spacecraft. The third astronaut is on the left side.

ZOTAC had added a second kind of their small PC boxes into their product program and it's available now.
The ZOTAC ZBOX nano VD01 has a Mini-ITX size mainboard with VIA's latest Dual Core Processor Nano U4025. The processor has a 1.2 GHz clock frequency and is combined with VIA's own VX900H IGP chipset. There is one DDR3 SODIMM slot and the other standard IO ports, including one HDMI and one Display Port. The box offers also space for one 6.4 cm SATA HDD or SSD.
You can buy the ZBOX for a little less than 170 €.

If you want some more power, ZOTAC also offers a ZBOX with AMD Fusion processor, but the price for it is around 210 €.

The GLX-Dock team had recently released the new version 2.4 of their OpenGL accelerated desktop dock. GLX-Dock can be used on every window manager with compositing support. It includes a lot of small bug fixes, some new features and compatibility enhancements.

• The Power-Manager applet has been rewritten to work on any platform.
• A new Help applet has been added to help our beloved users
• Integration in the XFCE desktop has been improved.
• Several new DBus methods gives you the possibility to interact on the dock more easily.
• The dock can now be used in a Compiz-standalone environment.
• Let your dock dance thanks to the new Impulse applet! Have a look at this new applet, it's fun (but useless?)

Installation packages are already available for various distributions.

AMD added the Radeon E6460 to their Embedded products program. The E6460 is a low end OpenGL 4 compatible GPU and has the GDDR5 video memory on the same package.
AMD promises a long term availability up to 2016.

Photo: AMD

The specifications of the GPU are similar to the standard desktop Radeon low end chips.

40 nm bulk manufacturing process (TSMC)

TDP: 20 W

GPU clock frequency: 600 MHz

160 shaders (2 x 80 SIMD engines)

Shader model 5.0 and OpenGL 4.1 support

64 Bit memory interface with 800 MHz and 512 MiB GDDR5 on package

Up to 4 simultaneous, independent displays

In June AMD presented their new processor roadmap on the AMD Fusion Developers Summit 11.
The first Bulldozer architecture based processor Zambezi will be launched next month and fits into the AM3+ socket. The second generation Bulldozer architecture processor, the Komodo, will be launched in the middle of 2012 and should be designed for a FM1 or FM2 socket.
Everyone who adopts a new Bulldozer system this year, would invest in a already dead platform without a possible upgrade future and users might stay away from buying such an AMD system now.

According to a report from 4Gamer.net, AMD had withdrawn their earlier decision and will design the Komodo processor for the socket AM3+ now. This would make the AM3+ platform much more attractive for new buyers.

The Komodo processor will be similar to the Zambezi and includes only minor architecture enhancements. Both will be manufactured in the same 32 nm SOI process at GlobalFoundries and feature 4 or 5 Bulldozer modules, each with 2 x86_64 cores and a single shared FPU. Every module has a 2 MiB level 2 cache and the hole processor shares a 8 MiB level 3 cache. The dual channel DDR3 memory interface will support up to DDR3 1866 standard.

Acer announced their first Netbook with MeeGo Linux some weeks ago and it's a little available yet, at least in Europe. Some e-tailers had it in stock some days ago, but it was sold out quickly and must be pre-ordered now. It costs about 225 Euro and has a standard, up to date netbook configuration.

• Intel Atom dual core processor N570 with 1,66 GHz and 2-way multi-threading and Intel HD3150 graphics (Pineview)
• 2 GiB DDR3-1066 RAM
• 320 GB HDD with 5400 rpm
• 802.11 b/g/N WLAN
• 25,6 cm (10,1") WSVGA, 1024x600, non-glare display
• VGA webcam
• 6 cell Li-Ion battery with 4400 mAh capacity for up to 8 hours usage
• 1,3 kg