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 …

AMD has recently released two new Athlon processors to the market with opposite goals in mind for each. The AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors (3500+ and 3800+) have been designed to target the energy conscious at a 45-watt power consumption, giving an efficient solution for per-watt performance. The AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor 6000+ is directed at the opposite purpose, delivering high performance with a lower concern for excessive power consumption.

“Our relentless focus on customer-centric innovation and industry leadership in performance-per-watt enables AMD to offer the market new energy-efficient AMD Athlon 64 processors. We expect that our commercial and consumer customers, as well as end-users, will be pleased with both the low noise and small form factor designs possible using this latest generation of energy-efficient desktop processors,” said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president, Desktop …

AMD has recently unveiled three new processors for mobile devices that are focused on enhancing multimedia capabilities - the AMD Imageon 2298, 2294 and 2192 media processors.

The processors are intended to bring faster and more efficient processing of high quality video and images to the mobile devices. Along with improved processing performance, multi-threading of applications would also be enabled to allow users to listen to music simultaneously while taking photos without disrupting the processing and music playback.

“As mobile broadband networks continue to increase capacity and improve quality, the consumer appetite for sophisticated multimedia on the go is growing exponentially,” said Paul Dal Santo, of AMD’s Handheld Business. “We are bringing to fruition our vision of helping global OEMs and network operators truly delight their customers with incredibly realistic, immersive media-rich experiences.”

The new Imageon media processors will enable a number of enhanced multimedia functions …

Today AMD did a demonstration of the world’s first Native Quad-Core X86 Processor, (codenamed Barcelona), at the annual Industry Analyst Forum in California. The demonstration was done on a four processor server platform running Windows 2003 Server 64 bit. The demonstration also showed the ease of upgrading the server simply by replacing the four DDR2-based Opteron processors with the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron’s and updating the BIOS.

Randy Allen, the corporate vice president for AMD in the Server and Workstation Division stated “AMD is guided by an overarching strategy to reduce datacenter complexity and to deliver performance increases without forcing customers to endure disruptive platform transitions,”. Allen added, “We discussed quad-core requirements with our customers and their end users, and determined that, as we did with the introduction of dual-core x86 processors in 2005, only a native quad-core x86 server processor …

Dell has recently released notebooks with AMD processors in them instead of the Intel chips which ends the exclusive long-standing relationship Dell had with Intel. This exclusivity ended recently when AMD Processors were added to Dell servers, providing these computers with AMD processors.

Dells website currently features an Inspiron 1501 notebook which comes with a range of AMD processors, including the AMD Sempron, AMD Turion 64 and the AMD Turion 64 X2 series. At a price tag of not much over $500, this makes for a more affordable notebook for gift buyers in the coming holiday season.

This was somewhat of a quiet release for Dell, as we just noticed the AMD ad on the web site, with no big press release, parade or anything.

Check it out [Dell]

Dell unveiled two PowerEdge servers at a press conference at Oracle Open World yesterday which both feature AMD Opteron processors. These processors are “SE” variations, which were previously only available in servers from Sun Microsystems. This is after a near 7-year hold that Intel had on the giant computer maker.

The first server that was introduced was the Dell PowerEdge 6950, which is a four-socket server designed for database software, server consolidation, along with similar uses. Dell states that the performance is is still at industry leading speeds while it can use up to 20 percent less power than similar previous-generation servers from Dell. The 6950 features quad Opterons running from 2.0 GHz to 2.8 GHz.

The second server introduced with the AMD Opteron was the Dell PowerEdge SC1435, which is a two-socket server optimized for high-performance compute clusters, distributed Web serving and …