APU 2013 – Day 2 Recap

Discover the highlights of Day 2 at APU 2013! From groundbreaking discussions on heterogeneous computing to insights from industry leaders like Oracle and Imagination Technologies, this recap will keep you in the loop and ahead of the curve.

John Melonakos
Nov 13, 2013
2 min read

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?