AMD Fusion 11 Developer Summit - as it was, Part 1
new AMD processors, technology, plenary reports, a lot of pictures
Last week, from June 13 to June 16, in the city of Bellevue, USA, the AMD Fusion 11 Developer Conference was held, which was organized by the well-known microprocessor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices or simply AMD. I was lucky to get to this event and for a few days to be in the center of announcements, speeches and reports on various topics of the world of processors and effective calculations on them. Many will be interested to know that the main topics of AMD Fusion were industrial standards, heterogeneous computing, OpenCL and DirectX technologies. And of course, the central place of the conference was taken by the new generation of APU-processors from AMD, the announcement of which took place on the plenary report on the first day of AMD Fusion.
I will tell about all these announcements and in more detail about the event itself below. This is the first post of the planned two posts about the conference. It tells about the preparatory day before AMD Fusion 11 and the first day of the conference, when the most important announcements were made. In the second post will be told about the second day of the summit and its announcements.
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This is an abbreviated version of my conference report. Here you will find only information about the event, announcements and technologies. If you are interested in my personal feelings, thoughts and other extraneous information about the trip, then follow these links ( beginning and continuation ) to a much more advanced version of the article.
Day 1
The city of Bellevue, where AMD Fusion conference took place, is a suburb of Seattle, a major industrial city in the western United States. The place is known for the famous factories of the Boeing company. But here, very close to Redmond, are the main offices and headquarters of Microsoft. And in Bellevue itself, almost every second building has the Microsoft logo, but more on that below.
It should be noted that getting to Bellevue from Yekaterinburg (where I live and work) is not an easy task. You must fly to Moscow (2:15 hours), fly to New York (10:20 hours), transfer to a flight to Seattle (6:31 hours) and drive to Bellevue by car (25 minutes). Take into account the time between connecting flights and get almost a full day of travel.
In general, flew and got to the hotel, I normally. All flights were on time, thanks to Aeroflot and Delta for the good work without interruption. I settled in the room, took a shower and instantly fell asleep, I had to get up early tomorrow, the most interesting part began. By the way, I stayed at the Courtyard Marriott hotel, after it there were excellent impressions: very nice service, very comfortable rooms and a bathroom, which had a bathroom. For me the hotel, in the room of which there is only a shower stall, already loses a couple of points of attractiveness.
Day 0
Zero Day, that is, the day before the start of the conference, on which, however, there are various press events.
The AMD Fusion 11 conference was held at the Meydenbauer Center exhibition center. I immediately liked the building and location of the conference for several reasons. First, the building has an elevator, stairs and an escalator. This greatly facilitates movement and eliminates congestion and crowds.
Secondly, the key components of the conference: the exhibition hall and the dinner place, the Internet zone, the press zone and the lecture halls were spread across the floors and this greatly facilitated navigation. If you need a report, then you know exactly what floor it is on.
Thirdly, on each floor there were a significant number of tables and seating, so that everyone could sit on the Internet or chat with colleagues on their own or with a group.
On the first picture there is a ground floor with reception information and flocks of registration. In the second photo the same rack of information from the height of the second floor.
Check-in desk from the second floor and view to the second floor. Then you and the escalator and elevator and stairs in one place.
Reports
Okay, I'll start smoothly to the reports. On day zero, the organizers conducted several introductory reports “for dummies”. For example, I visited the report “Intro to OpenCL”, where everyone was introduced to OpenCL technology, benefits from the GPU for calculations, the concepts of Work Items, Work Groups, Kernel, and so on.
There were a lot of people on this report, so there were no empty seats. Many questions have been asked. Several points were obvious at once: firstly, AMD was putting a lot of emphasis on OpenCL, as an industry standard, and secondly, there was a lot of interest from the conference participants. So love for OpenCL is clearly mutual.
Then I was lucky and I met Russian-speaking colleagues from Microsoft, who are working on issues of high-performance computing in the company (alas, the photo was not very good).
The next performance I went to the zero day for was laboratory work on DirectCompute, a technology for computing on a GPU as part of DirectX. By the way, I remained extremely enthusiastic about the equipped laboratory room. Note the photo below, several rows of computers with pre-installed virtual machines with the ability to independently perform all that the speaker does on stage. Cool!
During the DirectCompute lab, Matthew Sandy talked about the advantages of DirectCompute as part of DirectX and gave a few examples of use that the lab team members could see and launch on their own.
Media Orientation
After the introductory sessions, the press had a special event, Media Orientation, during which the press was introduced to what was actually being discussed at the event, what would be presented and why all these technologies were needed. By the way, it looks like I haven’t mentioned that I visited AMD Fusion 11 as a press and it was doubly more pleasant. What I will tell later.
During the introduction, we were told about what AMD's strategy is:
- common standards lead to innovation
- Software and hardware develop in parallel
- AMD and its partners are opening a new era of user experience.
- industry leaders are uniting around heterogeneous computing
Among other products that already use the capabilities of AMD processors, games based on DirectX 11 and a number of software products were mentioned: Flash 10.2, ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater, WinDVD, CyberLink PowerDVD.
In general, the DirectX 11 line, which was spoken everywhere, passed through the entire Fusion conference. On the other hand, not a word was said about OpenGL. And I even asked about this from one of the representatives of AMD, to which I received the answer that OpenGL is not so in demand on the market as DirectX.
From DirectX 11 demonstrations, I especially liked the demonstration with shadows that dissipate as you move away from the drop point of the shadow. It looks cool and really adds realism.
Well, the main theme that was almost everywhere at the conference is OpenCL. AMD considers this technology a priority and highlights the following advantages:
- open standard
- cross-platform and portability
- full use of highly parallel computing on both the GPU and multi-core CPUs
- Scalability - balancing resources between APU, CPU, GPU.
The last example seemed to me very interesting, an industrial system designed for military needs, which uses the full power of AMD video cards for processing video streams in real time, primarily for image stabilization. On the demo it looked really cool, trembling with might and main “hands” images were processed into a smooth and calm image. The photo above shows what resources are consumed for this and other video corrections.
After that, we had some more interesting events, about which I tell in the full version of the report.
Day 1
In the morning I reached the exhibition center where I promised to have breakfast. And here another surprise awaited me: in my opinion, the conference organizers brilliantly combined the dining space with the technical exposition and demonstration stands. The idea is simple: you have breakfast or lunch, look at the stands, then take drinks (a third liter of coffee, for example) and slowly go to examine the stands, communicate with consultants.
And there was something to see. First, there were several booths with three-monitor configurations with a demonstration of AMD Eyefinity technology. And you know, they were really impressive. Especially spectacular was the stand with the racing game Dirt 3 on DirectX 11 with three 30+ inch displays (second photo). After you drive on such a configuration, the races on one monitor seem dull. So it pulls to use AMD Eyefinity at home. In the first photo, by the way, the Dragon Age II role-playing game is loaded and playing it on three monitors also provides a cool experience.
Such innovative products as Microsoft Kinect and Microsoft Surface were also presented in the demonstration area.
I have Kinect at home, but I've seen and tried Surface for the first time. It is a pity that it was the first version of the device, the second is significantly superior to it, but with the first it was possible to feel its portion of the fan. Really amazing device and a great tool for entertainment in the company somewhere in a bar or other public place.
First plenary report
The first plenary report was given by Philip Rogers, architect of the APU line from AMD. The plenary hall could easily accommodate several hundred conference participants, a huge screen would be installed in the center of the hall for the slideshow.
During the plenary report, much was said about the computing power of modern systems, that even laptops today have capacities that were previously considered supercomputers and in the future their performance will only increase. So, AMD believes that by 2020, laptops will be able to provide up to 10 teraflops of computing power.
During the plenary report, the main theme of the conference was officially presented - the new family of AMD Fusion APU processors of the A series codenamed "Llano".
New APU processors can contain up to four CPU x86 cores, plus an array of compute GPU cores (up to 400) based on Radeon with DirectX 11 support. In addition, new APUs are built in: a new generation of video decoder, a north bridge with PCIe support Gen2 and dual channel DDR3 memory. At the same time, new chips emit only 45 W of TDP and have a huge total performance.
Other technologies that are presented in the new processors are: AMD AllDay Power, AMD VISION Engine and AMD Steady Video which allow you to increase the efficiency of laptop operation from the battery and allow you to perform better graphics and video processing. AMD is confident that the reduced power consumption of new processors will increase the battery life by an average of up to 10.5 hours.
In addition, the combination of the new APU + discrete graphics card from AMD, according to the company, will increase the performance of graphics processing by 75%, thanks to the AMD Dual Graphics system.
In total, as part of the announcement, several configurations of new APU processors and their logos were presented:
Further, the topic of the plenary report was the topic of heterogeneous computing. AMD believes that the mixed computing that is performed on an APU (CPU + GPU) + discrete GPU system is the future of computing and software. GPU - becomes a modern coprocessor that will be used by each developer. Therefore, effective tools that are able to use all the computing power of computers today are very important for the entire industry.
During the report, much was said about the new platform FSA (Fusion System Architecture) and advanced technologies that are used in the architecture for dispatching the joint work of the CPU and GPU cores.
Those who are interested in the details of AMD technologies and new products of the company I refer to the following useful resources:
- Records and presentations of plenary reports of the AMD Fusion 11 conference http://developer.amd.com/afds/pages/keynote.aspx
- Announcement of new technologies in the company's blog http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2011/04/04/%E2%80%9Cllano%E2%80%9D-apu-is-shipping/
- Description AMD VISION Engine http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/Pages/vision-engine.aspx
- A list of 50 software products that are already taking advantage of AMD Fusion APU http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/Pages/vision-engine.aspx
- news about Fusion http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/
- AMD Fusion official website http://sites.amd.com/us/fusion/apu/Pages/fusion.aspx
- YouTube-video channel with demonstrations of new products and AMD technologies http://www.youtube.com/user/AMDUnprocessed
The plenary report ended with a lot of information in my head. It was easier for the press, immediately after the plenary report a question and answer session was held, at which the press representatives could ask their questions to all those specialists who presented new products on the plenary report stage.
After the plenary report and the Q & A session, I had a window, which I decided to fill out by making a short tour of the city. Details can be found in the full report.
After the window and a walk around the city it was time for lunch and the second plenary report, which was conducted by ARM. The main topic of the report from ARM was energy-saving technologies. Much attention was paid to the history of the company and the history of its technologies, as well as the future of computing and processors.
I recommend watching the video of the report and the presentation at the following address . The report was very interesting.
After that, we had a number of separate events from the conference, about which you can read in the expanded version of this report.
Ahead was the last day of the conference with a Microsoft plenary report and a number of interesting technical reports. But this will be discussed in the next part of the story.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/122310/
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