AMD’s new Radeon HD 6990M is based on the TeraScale 2 unified processor architecture and the Barts GPU core. This is a mobile equivalent to the company’s high-end Radeon HD 6990 PCI Express graphics card design and features 1,120 stream processing units, 56 texture units, 128 Z/stencil ROP units, and 32 colour ROP units. AMD has included support for OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1 and MicroSoft’s DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. There was no mention of the Thermal Design Point, so it is unclear how much power will be required to run this new chip.

Imagination Technologies will start to deliver IP for its POWERVR SGX543MP multi-processor graphics cores in early December. The POWERVR SGX543MP features scalable GP-GPU compute power, which can be fully utilised through all Khronos APIs including OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenVG™ 1.x and OpenCL™.

DirectCompute is a small tool which allows you to benchmark both DirectCompute and OpenCL general-purpose computing APIs by calculating tons of FFT-like data and some memory transfers. This version adds full OpenCL support, shaders profile selection, versions reporting and some basic results validations.

ExtremeTech discusses GPGPU computing on Windows 7. “Both Nvidia and ATI are committed to supporting DirectX 11 on their newest boards; and both now have early OpenCL drivers out as well. In particular, I expect both of their Windows 7 drivers will support OpenCL.” says Michael Miller.