After weeks of leaked pictures, specs, and pricing AMD went official today with the new HD 5970 video card. The card is the dual GPU beast that we have been hearing about for weeks now and we finally have the full specs list.

The card has dual GPUs with 3200 total stream processing units, 160 total texture units, and a GDDR5 memory interface. The card has 2GB of RAM clocked at 1GHz and the core clock for the card is 725MHz. the total number of transistors inside the card is 4.3 billion.

About a week ago, the first specifications for the HD 5970 video card from AMD tipped up. The full specs weren’t leaked but we did get a few general specifications of the card. We found out that it will have dual GPUs and will have 2GB of RAM.

Today the price of the video card leaked online when it was published early by ZipZoomFly. The card will reportedly sell for $599.99. That is no surprise I figured the card would be at least $500.

The Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was recently upgraded with new AMD processors that gave it enough performance to move up the top 5 supercomputers list. The Jaguar is a Cray XT5 supercomputer and is now the fastest machine in the world.

Jaguar previously used quad-core AMD processors and was upgraded to 6-core processors. The new upgrade gives the supercomputer a theoretical peak performance of 2.3 petaflops/s. The performance on the Linpack benchmark was 1.75 petaflops/second.

One of my all time favorite PC cases from Cooler Master was the Stacker wearing the NVIDIA green color for the trim. The special edition case was great for NVIDIA fans. Cooler Master has now unveiled a new case aimed at the AMD fan called the HAF 932 AMD edition.

The case has black with red trim and a clear side window with a frosted AMD dragon and AMD Fusion logo. The chassis also has red LED lights inside. Other features of the case are the same as the original HAF 932 chassis. The drive bays are tooless and the case has a removable HDD rack.

I have been looking out the windows trying to spot flying pigs since I read this. After years of fighting in courts, Intel and AMD have settled all antitrust and IP disputes. Intel got out of the thing paying only $1.25 billion to AMD.

That is a lot of money, but it’s not that much considering how bad things could have been. The two companies have also agreed to a 5-year cross-licensing agreement and Intel has agreed to abide by a set of business practice provisions.

Over the last several months most all of the new video cards that have been introduced by AMD and NVIDIA have been cheaper low to mid range parts. That is apparently about to change after some specifications have hit the web for the Radeon HD 5970.

The video card will have dual GPUs crammed onto one video card. The GPUs are codenamed Cypress and according to the leaked info, each GPU will have 1600 stream processors. The GPUs are built on the 40nm process.

ATI and NVIDIA are duking it out and over the last year with the economy in the toilet, most of the cards the pair has introduced have been lower priced mid-range cards rather than high-end parts. Those high-end parts often cost upwards of $500 or more each. Today images of a new high-end video card from ATI have leaked online.

The new card is called the ATI HD 5790 and it sports dual GPUs on one PCB. The specifications for the card are unknown. Performance data was reportedly available but AMD forced the information to be taken down, and surprisingly allowed the photos to remain.

We already know all there really was to know about the ATI HD 5770 and 5750 video cards ahead of their official launch. The cards turned up online in benchmarks a few weeks back showing decent performance for the price.

Today AMD went official with the new video cards and the specs we heard in the leaks turned out to be accurate. Namely, the 5770 has 800 stream processors and a core clock of 850MHz. The card has a memory clock of 1.2GHZ and will come in 512MB and 1GB versions using GDDR5 RAM.

Apple has been increasingly getting into bed with NVIDIA when it comes to GPUs for its line of notebooks. The problem is that many of the 9400 series NVIDIA GPUs that the company put inside Apple machines failed.

This opened the door for AMD and the company has announced that its video cards are now found inside the new iMac and Mac Pro computer systems. AMD reports that the new video cards support Snow Leopard’s OpenCL 1.0 implementation.

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.

At CES 2009 I spent some time in meetings with the guys from AMD. One of the products they were showing off at the time was the HP Pavilion DV2 ultra-portable notebook. The machine was the showpiece for a new AMD processor aimed at the ultra-portable market.

The DV2 uses the AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU and has a 12.1-inch LED backlit LCD with a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The little DV2 is not MacBook Air thin, but it is a svelte little beast. Measurements are 11.5-inches L x 9.5-inches D x 0.93 to 1.29-inches H and weighs 3.95 pounds.

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.