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.

Zalman is best known for its cooling products, and especially its popular CNPS line of CPU coolers. The company also builds cooling solutions for graphics cards, but why stop there? It's a question Zalman's decision makers asked themselves, and according to a Russian website, the answer they came up with is to try their hand at building videocards as an add-in board partner (AIB).

Poor yields and other challenges associated with the 28nm manufacturing process have Nvidia's and AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners starting to voice concerns about next generation GPUs, specifically Kepler (Nvidia) and Southern Islands (AMD). Both chip designers are turning to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to produce 28nm chips, and the lingering concern is that past issues may again present themselves.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a market research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, said graphics chip shipments "did not behave according to past years with regard to seasonality," but in a good way for GPU makers. Graphics chips didn't back-sass or start hanging around the wrong crowd, and instead misbehaved by outright ignoring the unwritten law of seasonality that says graphics shipments are supposed to slow down in the second quarter.