The future of AMD on the cards

AMD’s plans for their APU conference on 11 November are going strong and the company looks ready to weather a barrage of questions about the future of their CPU products and how HSA (Heterogeneous Software Architecture) works.

The agenda for the conference has been revealed and some interesting guests will be talking about how the APU affects them. Mike Muller from ARM will be talking about AMD’s efforts to bring ARM into the server space and how HSA affects them as a technical partner.

Nandini Ramani will be on stage to also discuss the impact of HSA on the Java environment, as one of the key things holding the performance of Java applications back is the slow advance of processors.

Imagination Technologies, the company that was spawned through AMD’s sell-off of their mobile graphics division, will also be talking about their collaboration with AMD and hopefully we’ll see some information relating to the Android platform.

The most anticipated speaker will be Johan Andersson, chief technical director for DICE on the Frostbite engine. Andersson’s speech will weigh in on AMD’s Mantle API that will seek to improve game performance and offer a single API that works across multiple platforms.

Finally, I didn’t expect Mark Papermaster to be the one to end off the conference with the title of his speech being “Powering the Next Generation Surround Computing Experience.” It’s possible that AMD may reveal some new tricks for Eyefinity and perhaps answer questions about how they will react to Nvidia’s GSync monitor technology.

4:00 – 5:00 p.m. (PST), Monday, November 11:

Lisa Su, senior vice president & general manager, Global Business Units, AMD: “Developers: The Heart of AMD Innovation”

Phil Rogers, corporate fellow, AMD: “The Programmers Guide to Reaching for the Cloud”

8:30 – 9:30 a.m. (PST), Tuesday, November 12:

Mike Muller, CTO, ARM: “Is There Anything New in Heterogeneous Computing?”

Nandini Ramani, vice president, Java Platform, Oracle Solutions: “The Role of Java in Heterogeneous Computing, and How You Can Help”

1:15 – 2:15 p.m. (PST) Tuesday, November 12:

Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, senior director, Mediatek USA: “How Many Cores Will We Need?”

Tony King-Smith, executive vice president, Marketing, Imagination Technologies: “Silicon? Check. HSA? Check. All done? Wrong!”

8:30 – 9:30 a.m. (PST), Wednesday, November 13:

Dominic Mallinson, senior vice president, Software, Sony: “Inside PlayStation 4: Building the Best Place to Play”

Brendan Iribe, CEO, Oculus VR: “Virtual Reality – A New Frontier in Computing”

1:15 – 2:15 p.m. (PST) Wednesday, November 13:

Johan Andersson, technical director, DICE: “Rendering Battlefield 4 with Mantle”

Mark Papermaster, CTO, AMD: “Powering the Next Generation Surround Computing Experience”