Computer

That's the essence of the message from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week, who made some remarkably candid comments (for Microsoft, anyway) about the failures of Windows Vista and his hopes for the future.

In new comments, Ballmer referred to the Vista debacle as having been an issue of "some uneven reception" because "we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility."

After much anticipation and following a string of continuous leaked rumors and details, the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has announced the launch of its next generation of desktop graphics processing units, the Radeon HD 5800 series, specifically designed to enable a performance boost over the company’s previous generation of cards, but also to provide users with a couple of new features. The series includes the Radeon HD 5870, AMD's new flagship card, and the HD 5850, both of which have been designed to enable full support of Microsoft's DirectX 11 API, but also for AMD's own Eyefinity multi-display technology and ATI Stream technology.

“With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. “As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more.”

In terms of pure performance, the new Radeon flagship model, the Radeon HD 5870, is capable of delivering up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, according to the chip maker. Built using a “2nd generation evolved 40nm process technology,” the new Radeon HD 5870 boasts a clock speed of 850MHz, coupled with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1.2GHz. With 1600 Stream Processing Units, double the number of the chip maker's previous generation of cards, the new Radeon HD 5870 GPU has been featured with a dual-slot cooling solution and is said to reach a maximum board power of 188 Watts, while in idle the card sits at 27 Watts, according to AMD.

As far as the HD 5850 is concerned, this card doesn't fall too far behind and is likely to become a favorite among technology enthusiasts. Built on the same Cypress GPU core, the card is clocked at 725MHz and is also featured with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, clocked at 1GHz. Its maximum power is rated at 151 Watts, while in idle, the HD 5850 sits at a comfortable 27 Watts.

In an Interview AMD's John Swinimer, public relations manager for the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker, told a couple of interesting facts about some of the company's upcoming products, including the much anticipated APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) such as AMD LIANO. Thanks to the details that Mr. Swinimer provided  with, we now know that AMD plans to unveil its first APUs sometime in 2011.

Also, according to a number of recently leaked slides of the company's notebook platforms, the 2011 APUs will also offer users support for Microsoft's upcoming API (Application Programming Interface), DirectX 11. According to the details that have recently been made available on the English version of Expreview, AMD's 2009, 2010 and 2011 notebook platform roadmap includes the Tigris, the Danube and the Sabine, respectively. From the three, Sabine will be the first to boast an AMD APU, codenamed “Llano”.

The AMD “Llano” APU will sport a processing unit with up to 4 cores, an integrated graphics processing unit, as well as support for DDR3-1600MHz memory, and it will be manufactured using 32nm processing technology. The APU will be coupled with AMD's new chipset SB9xxM, which will boast support for USB 3.0, 16 USB ports, 6 SATA ports, RAID and AMD's next-generation discrete notebook GPU.