APU 2013 – Day 2 Recap

Today was the first full day of AMD’s APU 2013 conference. It was a whirlwind of heterogeneous computing.

From the morning keynotes, three particular salient points stuck out to us:

1. Mike Muller, CTO at ARM, talked about heterogeneous computing. He said it nicely with, “Heterogeneous computing is the future. It has also been our past, but we didn’t notice because a few shiny companies overshadowed everything else.” That is a great way to describe it. The future of heterogeneous computing involves the rise in importance of non-x86 processors. Throwing a few more MHz onto a CPU no longer is capable of satiating computational demands.
2. Nandini Ramani, VP at Oracle, talked about the importance of Java for heterogeneous computing. She pointed to the 9 million worldwide Java developers. She announced that Oracle would be joining the HSA foundation. She had some killer slides which included code snippets and lambda expressions, a bold move for a VP in an industry keynote talk – we liked it!
3. Tony King-Smith, VP at Imagination Technologies, talked about the big gains mobile GPUs are experiencing (soon surpassing 20-30 GFLOPs) and the importance of libraries for the ecosystem.

Here are some other interesting tweets from the highlights of the conference today:

http://storify.com/melonakos/apu-2013-day-2-tweets

What were your favorite moments of APU 2013 today?

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