Yesterday we told you about a pair of Radeon HD 8000 series graphics cards set to storm the market at competitive price points, with the Radeon HD 8870 expected to rival Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680 for $279, and the 8850 taking on the GTX 670 for $199 (both are expected MSRPs). What about the high end? Fear not, AMD is working on an enthusiast grade 8000 series part, as well.

Another high profile executive has fled Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Thomas Seifert, previously the Sunnyvale chip designer's Chief Financial Officer (CFO), has resigned "to pursue other opportunities." Taking his place is Devinder Kumar, senior vice president and corporate controller. Kumar assumes the position on an interim basis as AMD seeks a permanent replacement.

AMD's newly appointed CTO Mark Papermaster provided the public with its first glimpse of its upcoming Steamroller x86 CPU core. Steamroller represents the third generation of AMD's Bulldozer architecture, succeeding Piledriver (second generation) with improved parallelism, increased performance, and more instruction cache, which will lead to 30 percent fewer cache misses and a 20 percent reduction in mistaken branch predictions.

Zotac specializes in pint sized PCs and is best known for its Zbox Nano line of small form factor (SFF) systems. Thanks to the rapid march of technology, these types of machines, when properly configured, can pack a performance punch that defy their compact form, and that's exactly what Zotac hopes to achieve by upgrading its Zbox Nano line with an AMD E2-1800 accelerated processing unit (APU).