Posted 11/20/09 at 11:15:49 AM by Paul Lilly

AMD's newest HD 5970 is the fastest videocard on the planet, and as it turns out, it's also the hardest to find. And not just in the U.S. either, the card has been equally elusive in the EU.

According to news and rumor site Fudzilla, several AMD launch partners confirmed there would be limited availability of the card, and that's been the case so far. Newegg showed some stock in the wee morning hours on November 18th, but by the time noon (PST) rolled around, stock was gone. The $625 price tag doesn't appear to be slowing demand.

Fudzilla says it's been told to expect to see stock of the XFX Radeon HD 5970 and 5970 Black Edition sometime today, but it's unclear if that will include the U.S. market, or be limited to Europe.

Seen the HD 5970 in stock somewhere? Hit the jump and post a link. 

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Posted 11/18/09 at 07:27:22 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Moore’s Law states that approximately every two years, the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles. This has held true for the last 50 years. But there will come a point one day when physics puts a stop to that. Eventually the boundaries of atomic scale will limit transistor density. However, a new breakthrough in the field of quantum computing may provide hope for future advances. Until now, a quantum computing device had to be designed for one, and only one, operation. But scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed the first programmable quantum processor.

Quantum processing units are fundamentally different in a number of ways. First, where a regular bit can be only 1 or 0, a quantum bit (or qubit) only assumes a value of 1 or 0 when it is observed. Additionally, Quantum computers aren’t bound by Boolean operators like ‘and, ‘or’ and ‘not’. Finally, two qubits can be “entangled”, meaning they will always have the same value when observed, even if separated.

The NIST computer consists of two quantum gates, one single qubit gate and an entangled two qubit gate. The gates utilized two beryllium ions stimulated with UV lasers to represent operations. The test programs run came back with 79% correct results. Certainly not perfect, but a huge step forward. You won’t be dropping one of these into a socket on your motherboard anytime soon, but maybe someday.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 11:30:49 AM by Paul Lilly

ATI on Tuesday released its Catalyst software suite, version 9.11, for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. The latest release appears to put a heavy focus on squashing bugs as opposed to injecting performance enhancements to specific gaming titles.

New features include GPU acceleration of H.264 video content using Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta, and high quality downscaling for video transcoding MSE. Everything else in the release notes is geared towards resolving issues for various OSes. Some of these include:

• Users can now enable and disable CrossFire when three displays are configured in extended mode (all OSes)
• Catalyst Control Center no longer stops responding when setting Eyefinity SLS mode for extended HDMI display (all OSes)
• Resolved an issue where high bit rate audio from Blu-ray discs might not output when using PowerDVD 10 (Windows 7)
• Wolfenstein no longer stops responding when running a 2560x1600 resolution (Windows 7)
• No more green lines at the bottom of the screen when playing some interlaced content (Vista)
• PowerDVD no longer intermittently terminates when playing HD MPEG2 content in extended/clone mode (Vista)
• Transcoding of AC3 files no longer shows corruption in transcoded files (XP)

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Posted 11/18/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Loyd Case & Gordon Mah Ung

You can forgive AMD for stealing a line from Nvidia’s playbook. From the name and marketing materials, it’s not obvious that this card is a dual GPU card. One AMD chart even refers to the card as the “ATI Radeon HD 5970 GPU,” much like Nvidia’s 295 GTX is a dual GPU card that’s sold as if it were a normal graphics card.

We first take a quick look at the speeds and feeds of the new card, and then discuss additional features. We’ll compare them to the Radeon HD 5870 single GPU card; there are differences in core and memory clock speeds. Then, we jump into the benchmarks, comparing the Radeon HD 5970 to four other videocards in high-resolution gaming. 

And if those numbers don't impress you, wait until you see how this beast performs in Crossfire for a total of four GPUs. 

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Posted 11/18/09 at 08:30:13 AM by Paul Lilly

A little prerequisite reading is in order. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out Lloyd Case and Gordon Mah Ung's article covering ATI's Radeon HD 5970, a videocard we've dubbed "The Undisputed Performance Champ." Once you read through that feature, you'll be in a better position to appreciate the awesome power that comes from cramming two HD 5970 videocards into a CrossFire X configuration, and that's exactly what Maingear has done.

The boutique system vendor today announced the immediately availability of said cards into its Shift PC. By doing so, Maingear says gamers are afforded 10 teraflops of pixel pushing power when enhanced with the company's Redline technology.

"The Maingear Shift was designed specifically to harness the incredible amount of GPU power that is on the horizon," said Wallace Santos, CEO and founder of Maingear. "The ATI Radeon HD 5970 truly ushers in a new era of everyday supercomputing for the consumer. Besides having a total of 3200 stream processors each for an incredible gaming experience, with Windows 7 and DriectCompute, these cards can be used to accelerate everything from video editing and transcoding to advanced photo manipulation."

As we previously reported, the Shift can be configured with either an Intel P55 or X58 foundation, and you can outfit either one of them with a pair of HD 5970 videocards. All that power doesn't come cheap, however, and you'll be looking at about an additional $1,500 over the base configuration, which includes an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250.

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Posted 11/17/09 at 01:47:35 PM by Loyd Case

In the past year, AMD seems to have been taking a sort of “strategy du jour” approach. We ship low cost processors! We do low power CPUs! Our parts are great for overclockers! We love home theater PCs!

Those messages weren’t really different from anything Intel, the 900 pound velociraptor in the CPU  business, would offer up, but there was always a tinge of desperation. This became more noticeable as Intel slowly and methodically stripped away whatever technology edge AMD had. Intel’s Nehalem was really the last straw: AMD couldn’t even claim “true quad core” any longer.

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Posted 11/16/09 at 02:30:15 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

In this episode, the gang discusses the implications of Intel's $1.25 billion anti-trust settlement with AMD, the release of the Motorola Droid, and the Modern Warfare 2's record-breaking launch. We also answer a few doctor questions, and Gordon fumes about replacable laptop batteries, headshots, and games that play themselves in his most hilarious rant of the week yet. 

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? A secret to share? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

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Posted 11/16/09 at 11:45:19 AM by Paul Lilly

IBM's Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is no longer the planet's most powerful supercomputer. That distinction now belongs to a Cray supercomputer named "Jaguar" at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which regained the performance crown over the weekend, ComputerWorld reports.

Jaguar, which benefited from a few recent upgrades, is now capable of 1,759 petaflops per second courtesy of 224,162 processor cores. That's enough to jump ahead of IBM's Roadrunner, which dropped to 1,042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned.

Number three on the list of supercomputers is Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Kraken is capable of churning out 832 teraflops per second and was ranked No. 6 in June.

One of the more interesting supercomputers belongs to China. The hybrid Intel-AMD Tianhe-1 in the city of Tianjin pushes out 563 teraflops per second, putting it in fifth place. China's supercomputer combines Intel's Xeon processors with AMD-brand GPUs as accelerators. Each node contains two Xeon chips attached to two AMD GPUs.

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