AMD fans might be looking forward to Piledriver, but the Sunnyvale chip maker isn't quite ready to move on from Bulldozer. On the contrary, AMD today sent out a message announcing two new FX-Series Bulldozer chips -- AMD FX-4170 and FX--6200 -- along with a price cut to its existing FX-8120 processor with eight processing cores clocked at 3.1GHz (4GHz via Turbo Core).
Has it already been almost five months since AMD's Bulldozer chips launched? Somehow, it has -- and that means it's time for the old info train to start rolling about Bulldozer's follow up, better known as "Piledriver." AMD has apparently been paying attention to our pleas for better, faster, MOAR because this week the company announced it was licensing new resonant clock mesh technology from Cyclos Semiconductor to help push Piledriver's clock speed over the 4GHz barrier.
Nearly six years have gone by since AMD scooped up ATI for $5.4 billion, and when it was first announced, analysts wondered if the chip maker was making the right move. AMD's multi-billion dollar gamble paid off, and until Kepler arrives, the Sunnyvale chip makers owns the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the world (Radeon HD 7970). But what if AMD had acquired Nvidia instead?
In the coming weeks, AMD will flesh out its Radeon HD 7000 lineup with its mid-range 7800 Series based on the Sunnyvale chip maker's Pitcairn GPU. Pitcairn slips neatly in between Cape Verde (Radeon HD 7700 Series) and Tahiti (Radeon HD 7900 Series) and will likely consist of three separate videocards, according to information that was leaked to the Web over the weekend.
If you want to get a jump start on upgrading the drivers for your AMD Radeon videocard, you can head over to AMD and grab the Catalyst 12.2 pre-certified drivers today. AMD says these drivers are identical to the upcoming certified release, just without Microsoft's official blessing, which will come later this month or in early March. In other words, this isn't beta code, the drivers just haven't gone through the certification process yet.
Few acts manifest the Maximum PC ethos as much as overclocking. Overclockers with something to prove have long been able to post their various benchmarking scores on HWBot to determine the king of the processor-pushing hill; now, that drive for MOAR can earn more than just bragging rights. Gigabyte just announced it has teamed up with HWBot for the "Gigabyte Spring Extreme Competition." Tinkerers with Gigabyte mobos and AMD processors are invited to try to push their systems to the (almost) breaking point, and the three people with the most prolific overclocking prowess will earn brand-spankin'-new Bulldozer-friendly mobos.
AMD this week confirmed the rumored departure of Eric Demers, Corporate Vice President and CTO of the Sunnyvale chip maker's graphics division, who is leaving the company to "pursue other opportunities." Demers is a long time veteran in the graphics business. He hooked up with ATI back in 2000, stayed with the firm when it was bought out by AMD, and held a number of positions through the years before becoming CTO and VP of AMD's Graphics Business.
Following AMD's 
AMD is giddy as all get-out today over the arrival of its Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and HD 7750 graphics cards, the first of which is the world's first graphics card equipped with a 1GHz GPU, the Sunnyvale chip maker claims. The 7750's special talent is that it doesn't require its own separate power connector and pushing gaming grade pixels while staying under 75W.
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