AMD Fusion Developers Summit Day 1 Keynote

Lisa Su, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Business Units, opened up this year’s AMD Fusion Developers Summit by reiterating AMD’s commitment to heterogeneous computing. She began her talk by saying that AMD is firmly committed to heterogeneous computing because the company has literally bet its future on the technology.

 
Lisa Su, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Business Units on stage at AFDS '12

She continued by talking about the ongoing shift in computing to lower power and mobile form factors, convergence, and how AMD is focused on aligning with the current market trends. She also talked about how AMD plans on advancing its products in the market and consistently delivering more features and performance. Lisa Su then went on to talk about how AMD’s technology is leading in the space through generational enhancements to the company’s GPUs and APUs. “The mission is to drive innovation and adoption of APUs across all markets”, Su said. She continued on by talking about recent GPU and APU releases, focusing mostly on Trinity, which is AMD’s second generation A-Series APU. She implored the developers in attendance to create new ways to leverage the capabilities of AMD’s APUs and said this week's AFDS, is all about making it easier to develop for application for heterogeneous computing. Su then continued on by talking about AMD’s commitment to open standards like OpenCL and then talked a bit about many of the key players in heterogeneous computing, like Adobe, Arcsoft, and many others.

 
AMD's John Taylor and Manju Hedge at AFDS '12

Lisa finished up and John Taylor and Manju Hedge came out on stage. Mr. Taylor said, “This is now the epicenter of the heterogeneous computing movement”, referring to AFDS, and went on to thank the many sponsors of the event. Then Manju Hedge took over.

Adobe Talks Heterogeneous Computing
He told a quick story about how the next speaker wasn’t able to speak at last year’s event, but that they’re so excited about what he was working on, AMD was willing to adjust the AFDS schedule this year to accommodate. Manju Hedge then brought out Tom Malloy who runs the Advance Technology Labs at Adobe. Mr. Malloy went through a brief history of heterogeneous computing advancements at Adobe and moved on to some of the cool features in Photoshop CS6. Along with a partner running the demo machine, he showed PS’ Blur Gallery capabilities which leverage the GPU. Mr. Malloy then went on to talk about Adobe’s goals and model when designing the feature.

 
Tom Malloy, Advance Technology Labs director at Adobe

The next demo Malloy showed was the Real-Time Rendering capabilities of Adobe Premiere. With Premiere CS6, Adobe wanted to accelerate not only effects but the whole workflow. The demo had four HD videos all scaled and positioned so they could all have effects on them. He showed the new adjustment layer tool which allowed for the effects to alter all four videos in real-time, simultaneously, while the video was still playing. He continued to add other effects, all while the videos continued to play in real time, without skipping a beat. Mr. Malloy continued by noting the -Time Rendering technology of Adobe Premiere is enabled by leveraging the GPU.