Rumor Mill: PlayStation Vita Launches in Asia on November 12

A new rumor suggests that the Asian launch date for the all new Sony made PlayStation Vita handheld is set for November 12, with the Western markets set to get access to it during the month of March 2012.

The rumors come from a French site called GamaLive, which says that it has a source inside the headquarters of Sony.

The source says that Japan and Hong Kong will be getting the new device on November 12 or close to that date and it seems that various media outlets all over the world will also get their handhelds during that month.

Sony is also said to be keen on getting the Vita out in the West during March, before the end of the current fiscal year, so that it can incorporate good launch sales into its financial results.

The information offered by the source inside Sony is pretty close, apart from the clear Asian launch date, to what the company itself has said about Vita, claiming that it will be out before the end of 2011 on the Japanese market and in early 2012 in the rest of the world.

It's not clear whether the launch in Japan and in Honk Kong means that gamers in other parts of the world can order their own devices from abroad.

Sony has already said that the device will not be region locked but retailers might not be prepared to sell to those abroad if there's a significant demand from local markets.

Sony is positioning the PlayStation Vita as a device for the hardcore gaming crowd, those who are interested in getting good looking games and a lot of control options in a mobile package.

The new device will have an OLED screen, a touch screen on the back of the device as well as more traditional controls, with roughly half the computing power of the PlayStation 3.

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AMD's Upcoming Radeon HD 7900 GPUs May Use XDR2 Rambus Memory

In the last quarter of 2011, AMD is expected to launch its first 28nm graphics cards from the Radeon HD 7000 product series, and the latest leaks to reach the Web suggest that the top parts from this range may use AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture and high-speed XDR2 memory from Rambus.

According to Expreview, the launch of the Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards family will resemble that of the current Radeon HD 6000 solutions, as AMD will first introduce a couple of mainstream solutions into the market.

These will be the first graphics cores developed by the company to be built using the 28nm fabrication process and will use the Thames and Lombok cores.

Just like the Radeon HD 6900 series, these two cores are based on a VLIW4 (very long instruction word) architecture and are paired with GDDR5 memory.

If the information uncovered by Expreview is correct, then the highest performing Radeon HD 7000 solution to be launched in Q4 2011 is the HD 7870.

This features similar specifications with the current Radeon HD 6970, but thanks to the advanced fabrication process AMD managed to increase the GPU clock speed from 880MHz to 950MHz, while also decreasing the power consumption of the card from 250W to 120W.

As impressive as all this may sound, the Radeon HD 7900 series, which will be released most probably in the first quarter of 2012, manages to be even more thrilling as this will be based on AMD's Next Generation Core (NCG) architecture detailed at the company's Fusion Developer summit, which took place in mid-June.

We talked about this new arch in detail in some of our previous articles, so we are not going to get into this now, but the key aspect of NCG is that it will improve the performance and functionality of GPGPU computing.

Together with the all new architecture, AMD will most probably also introduce XDR2 memory developed by Rambus, which its manufacturer claims it can double the bandwidth of GDDR5, while using 30% less power.

Judging by the information leaked, the top part in the Radeon HD 7900 family is going to be called the HD 7970 and it includes 2048 shaders clocked at 1GHz, 128 texture units, 64 ROP units, a 256bit memory bus and 2GB of XDR2 video buffer.

This will work at an impressive 8000MHz, while the total power consumption of the card is rated at 190 watt.

Finally, is quite a bit early to tell if these specifications are indeed true, but all the rumors published until now seem to confirm the fact that a part of the Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards will be based on the Next Generation Core architecture. (via Nordic Hardware)

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