AMD is making a comeback with its ATI video cards and GPUs. The company announced that it had claimed the discrete notebook GPU lead last quarter. NVIDIA still dominates the discrete desktop GPU space, but there are some interesting options for ATI fans available.

One of the newest ATI video cards is the HIS HD 4890 iCooler x4. The video card has 1GB of GDDR5 RAM and an exclusive cooler to keep the card cool. The cooler has dual heat extraction slots. One of the slots routes hot air outside the case.

AMD and NVIDIA are two of the biggest names in the GPU industry. AMD is traditionally the bridesmaid and never the bride when it comes to holding the most market share in the GPU industry. AMD has finally grabbed the crown from NVIDIA in at least one GPU segment.

AMD has announced that new figures from Jon Peddie Research have been released that show it now has the bulk of the discrete GPU market in the notebook segment. According to JPR figures, ATI gained 36.5% market share and grew its quarter-to-quarter shipments 87.27% for the first six months of 2009.

AMD is fighting hard to gain some momentum in the CPU and GPU market after five consecutive quarterly losses. The way to gain traction in the marketplace with gamers and enthusiasts is to offer products that perform better than or as well as the competition at lower prices.

AMD has announced this week that it is offering the first factory GPU to hit 1GHz. The GPU is included on the Radeon HD 4890 and is overclocked right from the factory using stock air-cooling. The GPU is paired with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM and delivers 1.6 TeraFLOPS of processing power.

When most of us think of video cards, we immediately think of gaming computers. Gamers spend hundreds of dollars on their video cards in search of good frame rates and graphics. In the professional world, graphics cards are used to provide data to multiple monitors.

ATI has announced its latest pro graphics card called the ATI FirePro 2450. The card is low profile and half-height making it suitable for small form factor machines. Despite its small size it packs in 512MB of RAM and supports four DVI or VGA monitors at resolutions up to 1920 x 1200.

Discrete graphics cards in notebooks make more than playing games possible. This is why you see discrete graphics cards on notebooks that are not meant for gaming. A discrete GPU on a notebook also allows the decoding of HD video on the GPU freeing the CPU up so the entire system runs faster.

AMD has announced at CeBIT that it has the world’s first 40nm GPUs that are in its Mobility Radeon HD 4860 and 4830 lines. The GPUs support DirectX 10.1 games and offer HD multimedia capability. AMD says the GPUs are also optimized for long battery life.

AMD and NVIDIA are the only two companies for most consumers in the discrete video card industry. The two firms are always battling for the superior products in the market place. Over the last few years, NVIDIA has been the more dominant firm in performance, but ATI has scored a few wins, especially with its newer high-end video cards.

Yesterday AMD officially confirmed rumors that were floating around claiming that it would be dropping the price on two of its most popular video cards. Specifically the price is dropping on the Radeon 4850, 4870 512MB, and the 4870 1GB cards.

The economy is bad and when the leading CPU maker in the world, Intel, announces that its profits aren’t that great and it will be restructuring to better compete you can bet that the second place chipmaker is on rough times as well.

AMD, said second place chipmaker, announced its Q4 2008 and fiscal 2008 revenues and things don’t look good for the company. AMD posted revenue in Q4 2008 of $1.162 billion, a decrease of 35% from Q3 2008 and 33% percent down from the same quarter of 2007.

I was at CES last week schlepping around the halls looking for something cool. Unfortunately cool was in short supply at this year’s show. One of the things that I did find interesting was the new mobile GPUs that AMD was showing off.

AMD introduced its line of Radeon Mobility 4000 video cards for notebooks that includes the HD 4800, HD 4600, HD 4500 and HD 4300 GPUs. The HD 4800 is the first mobile GPU according to AMD to break the teraflop barrier.

There are still many gamers who have yet to upgrade to Windows Vista. Part of Windows Vista that was most appealing to gamers was DirectX 10 compatibility. DirectX 10 is something you can’t get on Windows XP.

According to AMD when Windows 7 hits market, widely believed to be mid-2009, DirectX 10.1 will be fully supported. According to AMD DirectX 10.1 will be used in the API for the Windows Desktop Manager in Windows 7.

NVIDIA and AMD/ATI routinely fight it out in the video card market for dominance and the gamers dollar. Recently NVIDIA has been producing the better performing video cards, but AMD is back with a new family of GPUs selling at low prices that it hopes will grab some of NVIDIA’s market.

AMD announced officially today its Radeon HD 4800 series video cards with 800 processing cores. The HD 4850 carries a retail price of $199 and has a stock GPU speed of 625 MHz. Memory for the card is 512MB of GDDR3. AMD says that the GPU in the card can deliver a teraflop of computing power.

For a while now scientific and engineering projects have been using what are basically computer video cards to get significantly more powerful computer systems than are seen when using traditional CPUs. The performance gains come from the fact that each stream processor on modern video cards can be used like an individual processor core. Rather than only four cores in a CPU, the video card offers in the area of 320 processing cores thanks to the high number of stream processors.

AMD announced its latest FireStream processor called the AMD FireStream 9250. The 9250 is designed to accelerate HPC, mainstream and consumer applications. The 9250 fits into a single PCI slot and consumes under 150W of power and AMD says it has a performance per watt efficiency of up to eight gigaflops per watt.

AMD has been taking a beating in the marketplace for a while now at the hands of rival Intel. While Intel profits are up AMDs lagging sales have led to executives leaving the company and talks of employee cutbacks and restructuring of the company.

In an attempt to get some of its lost sales back AMD announced three new Phenom X3 triple-core processors today. The three processors are best combined with the AMD 780 series chipset according to AMD. This will unlock a full HD experience and what AMD calls stunning gaming and digital performance.

Hot on the heals of the Barcelona Quad Core processor introduction last week, AMD today confirmed rumors and unveiled a new triple core addition to the Phenom lineup of dual-core and quad-core processors. The new triple core Phenom (code named “Toliman”) will be added in the first quarter of 2008 and will likely take its place in a new pricing tier between the dual and quad cores.

AMD says the new CPU’s will be the first ever to offer 3 cores on a single silicon die, even though the makeup of the new triple core will be essential the same as that of the quad-core, with one of the cores removed. The 3-core CPU’s will allow AMD to provide more purchasing options for consumers while still introducing multi-core technology into more computer purchases without requiring consumers to buy into the full quad-core price.

Today it’s AMD’s turn again to announce that it has the best of the best with what the company is calling the “World’s Most Advanced x86 Processor”, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron. To back up this claim AMD boasts a number of enhancements with the new processor, including more energy efficiency, better virtualization performance and offers “non-disruptive” transitions from dual-core to quad-core.

AMD also talked about additional improved energy efficiencies in today’s press release with things like AMD CoolCore Technology which powers down unused parts of the processor, Independent Dynamic Core Technology which allows each core to vary its only clock frequency, and Dual Dynamic Power Management which allows each core to regulate its only voltage depending on usage.

AMD announced Wednesday the first chipset from the company that combines AMD’s technology with ATI’s in the ATI Radeon X1250 GPU.

By combining the Radeon graphics processing with AMD’s 690 chipset they eliminate the need for a separate graphics card. “With its leading image quality and 3D graphics capabilities, the AMD 690 series chipset is a proven performer, easily handling the demanding workloads of today’s PC users,” said Phil Eisler, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Chipset Division in a press release Wednesday. “This is just the first in a line of innovative, high- performance AMD chipsets that we’ll introduce to address every sector of the market.”

The new integrated 690 chipset is said to provide an excellent viewing experience with operating systems such as the new Windows Vista making Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D an common part …