Hey everybody and welcome to a live event all the way from Hawaii. With AMDs new flagship processor being developed under codename Hawaii AMD decided to invite the world enthusiast tech press towards this beautiful location to form the basis of a technology briefing. During the event there will be a live session from which Ill try to update this news item, so keep refreshing the front-page or this particular news item.

AMDs briefing will exists out of several sessions, from the live event we'll post all the stuff we can post, later in the day however there will be an NDA briefing from which we can't say a thing until the embargo is lifted of course.

The non NDA part will be streamed live from this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHfmM6QYWNM We'll simultaneously broadcast it here from this news item.

Underneith the Broadcast window I will be adding information in a timely fashion (once the conference starts). Please press play for the livestream to start. A countdown timer is present, the start time is 3 p.m. EDT on September 25.

08:55 - Alaoha everybody ! Sit tight, the conference is about to begin.  For those that wonder, far right upper table :)

09:00 - The conference is starting/ AMD today will a handful of graphics 
cards and new technologies. The last bit will be interesting, it's called Mantel. Of course there will be some GPUs too! And we smell some Battlefield 4 demo's coming up.

09:10 - conference is slightly delayed due to the livestreem looping a 7 minute video, hold on.

09:18 - Conference is delayed for 30/45 mins. AMD is on the phone with YouTube to get things fixed. Once the stream is fixed the conference will start.

09:27 - Wanna see the new R9 290X ? click here.

09:33 -  Inserted a new livestream. Hope this one works better then Youtube.

09:45 - Ok guys, just got the word that they'll go live in 15 minutes.

10:00 - Conference has started. Matt Skinner is talking about sight and sound with a new Techland title Dying Light and unified gaming Strategy. Client - cloud - console and content are the keywords here. Skinner talks about a more efficient programming model from AMD for the game developers. Making reality on the screen is the key factor here (DOF/TressFX etc).

10:13 AMD today will announce the Radeon R9 and R7 series. R7 250 (1 GB 89 USD), R7 260X (2Gb 139 USD), R9 270X (2GB 199 USD), R9 280 (3GB 299 USD), R9 290X (4GB no specs yet). There will be a R9 290X Battlefield 4 (selected partners) bundle.

10:17  Raja Koduri gets on stage. There will be three pilars for the R290X release; updated (enhanced) GCN architecture. DirectX 11.2 support, improved energy efficiency for this architecture. The card can do 5 TFLOPS compute. 300 GB/sec memory bandwith. That is 20x more bandwith then Radeon 9700 launched in 2002. Geometry perf is now 4 billion triangles per second. R9 290X has 6 billion transistors !

4K resolution gaming in Ultra HD is supported on this card. As you guys know we posted a review on 4K gaming last week. AMD is improving upcoming driver to support multi panel 4K displays. Automatically stitch 4K monitors / supported in catalyst. AMD is proposing a new VESA standard to get broad 4K support. VESA has accepted this and once available you will see these monitors supported out of the box.

True Audio - Raja is talking about audio immersion. And AMD is implementing a fully programmable audio engine, True Audio technology. You guys know programmable shaders for visuals, this now applies for audio as well to improve an audio effects (relatime voices and audio channels in your game opposed to what is possible with CPUs today). Enabling directional (surround) audio over input.

10:39 - GenAudio is demonstrating some amazing audio 7.1 demos. Surround with stereo is being virtualized as well, sounds nice. This is called AstoundSound. Sounds pretty nice TBH. Graphics vs. Audio. To run complex audio mechanism there isn't enough CPU power left. GenAudio tries to bring professional grade audio to the PC with True Audio technology. High Quality Reverb, Room Simulation True 3D audio dedicated audio processing. Game developers can use the Wwise audio plugin to get all this going.

10:53 - VP Audio Kinetic Simon Ashby gets on stage develops the Wwise plugin to get all this audio madness going. Solutions for better audio.. -> Consistent - Focus - Immersion. Wwise will run over AMD TrueAudio technology (DSP). Audio effects can use up-to 14% of your CPU, this is not offloaded to the graphics card (AMD TrueAudio Technology). 

10:59 - Lead Sound Designer Yves Breton from Eidos (Thief) gets on stage. Talks about convolution reverb with TrueAudio Technology. 

11:07 - Jos van Veld producer Xaviant gets on stage. Talks about Lichdom 'Redeemer' the game. AstoundSound demo is being played.

11:19 - Maingear Wallace Santos CEO gets on stage. Hyper System builder. Talks a out AMD being such a good partner and their SHIFT, a new desktop liquid cooled setup with R9 290X liquid cooled GPUs.

11:22 - Richie Corpus ISV Gaming and Alliances gets on stage. Talks about TressFX hair simulation, Ruby is back - Introduces Ruby, has TresFX and seveteen DX11 features, Demo will becomee available for download. Talks forward rendering like Hardware MSAA, unlimited materialss and transparancy. Ability to use as many deferred lights as possible (thousands of animated lights). Talks about Battlefield 4 being optimized for graphics core next (GCN) with dynamic environments, char animationss and tile based deferred rendering. Chris Roberts gets on stage, foundeer of Cloud Imperium Games. Talks about Star Citizen, a sci-fi space sim -- waaaay too long btw;)

12:00 - Dennis Fong CEO Raptr goes on stage. Talks about Gaming Evolved Raptr appbeing released soon. Helps optimizing games and apps. 

12:14 - Johan Anderson on screen (frostbite/Dice) and shows interview/overview in relation to AMD and Battlefield 4 versus their corporation. Talks about Frostbite 3 engine.15 games are in development with Frostbite engine. Highlights on BF4 gets Levolution (scyscrapers that can fall apart), Mentions multiplayer water simulation, compute shader lighting and VFX. Talks about Project Mantle, Some more info just came in on Mantle. Mantle is an AMD initiative to create a new graphics programming model that  exploits the capabilities of modern GPUs. So basically this allows game developers to speak the native language of the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, that should allow a deeper level of hardware optimization. AMD have worked with leading game developers to create an API specification and associated graphics driver that enables this model on PCs with GCN-based graphics hardware. Basically a Low level programming console style rendering API. Gives highly optimized GPUs, low CPU utilization. 

12:30 - Battlefied 4 Demo Single player shown  - woohoo !

Conference ended. Graphics card release date, specs and details remain under embargo for now.

Highlights:

• Radeon R9 and R7 series coming later this year, R9 is enthusiast-class while R7 is for performance users who want a better price/performance ratio 
• R9 290X - 4GB GDDR5, around 3000 stream processors, 512-bit memory bus, pricing unknown. AMD is still secretive about sharing exact details with the general public.
• R9 280X - 3GB GDDR5, $299, > 6800 in Firestrike
• R9 270X, 2GB GDDR5, $199, > 5500 Firestrike
• R7 260X - 2GB GDDR5, $139, > 3700 in Firestrike
• R7 250- 1GB GDDR5, < $89, > 2000 in 3DMark Firestrike