ATI Radeon HD 5970: The World's Fastest Graphics Card [Graphics Cards]

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 slaughters the competition in pretty much every benchmark thrown at it. It's outrageously fast. We're talking five teraflops here, people. Teraflops.
MaximumPC put the 5970 to the test, and found that it lives up to its promise. The 2GB dual-GPU card is the first to support DirectX 11, and basically doubles its wholly respectable predecessor (the 5870) in specs, capable of delivering nearly 5 teraflops of raw processing power. It's a massive card, about a foot long, designed mostly for heat dissipation, at which aim it apparently succeeds. It's also got easy access to overclocking via AMD's OverDrive, and can drive up to three displays simultaneously with a maximum resolution of 7680x1600. So it's pretty much the greatest thing ever, and it's got a pricetag to match: $600 upon its undisclosed release.
[Gizmodo via MaximumPC]

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AMD's Plan to Take Back Laptops: The Llano "APU" [Processors]

If you want a laptop with graphics performance that isn't totally embarrassing, you're pretty much stuck with some combination of Intel and Nvidia gear. Now, finally, the AMD Llano, a CPU/GPU combo, or 'APU', could give us a serious alternative.
AMD running with the 'Application Processor Unit' name isn't as gimmicky as it sounds, because the Llano is genuinely unique: It's four processing cores and a DX11-capable GPU on a single processor die. In simpler terms, this means that AMD has created a tidy little system on a chip, aimed at a few portable markets. In the simplest terms, they've shrunk laptop graphics and processing into a single chip, which saves power and space.

So! Not much is known about the Llano right now, but we can pick out some broad themes. The chip's power regulation is novel, monitoring specific chip functions to gauge power draw rather than sensors. The graphics capabilities, though still generally a mystery, wouldn't have to be very good at all to trump Intel's lame integrated graphics. In other words, as Ars notes, this could be the first real baby of the still torrid AMD/ATI marriage, and the start of an ATI comeback, at least in laptops.

Or, given that we're not expected to see these processors in products until 2011, when everything could be completely different, it could be none of these things.
[Gizmodo via Ars Technica]

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ATI Radeon HD 5450 Has DX11 Graphics Support For Only $60 [ATI]

Well, this is nice: a Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card available on the cheap. It looks like you're not sacrificing much in performance, either: The $60 Radeon 5450 has full DX11 graphics and Eyefinity multi-display support.
The $60 version comes with a 512MB memory configuration, and you lose a little speed compared to the 5800 and 5600 lines. But the 5450 is also optimized for HTPCs, with HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
DX11 graphics, for those who forgot, can be pretty brain-melting.
For sixty bucks? Yes, please.
[Gizmodo via BusinessWire]

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