New firmware for Plextor's M5 Pro SSDs provides a free performance boost.

Wouldn't it be awesome if, after buying a new sports car, the dealership called you in for a free tuneup that netted you additional horsepower? Unfortunately, life doesn't always work that way, just don't tell that to Plextor. The former optical drive player that now concentrates its efforts on solid state drives (SSDs) just announced the availability of its 100K Extreme firmware update for its M5 Pro SSD line.

Mushkin's Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD is small in size but big in capacity.

Mushkin will start shipping what it claims is the world's first 480GB capacity mSATA solid state drive (SSD) in January 2013, the company announced this week. Unlike traditional SSDs, mSATA (Mini-SATA) drives are much smaller and sport a connector that looks similar to a PCI Express Mini Card interface that's even electrically compatible, though the data signals need to be fed to the SATA host controller.

A Spanish website posted a bevy of detailed specs for Advanced Micro Device's (AMD) upcoming Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics card, and assuming they're accurate, there will be a dual-GPU version launching in the second quarter of 2013. That coincides nicely with a recent report that AMD was pushing the launch of its entire Radeon HD 8000 Series into next year, though we're inclined to take the launch dates with a grain of salt.

Advanced Micro Devices is apparently trying to flex its Radeon brand everywhere it can. In addition to video cards and system memory, both of which are markets currently served by the Radeon brand, it's rumored that AMD is getting ready to launch a line of Radeon solid state drives (SSDs). If this works out, perhaps one day you could build an entire PC with nothing but Radeon parts.