Phil Hughes is a Senior PR Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Myth No. 1: CPU is the brain of the computer.

Wrong. For a long time, when talking about PCs, people made the analogy that the CPU is the brain of the computer and the GPU is the eyes. The reason for this was obvious: CPUs do logical, numerical computation, while the GPU displayed images. As an analogy, the human brain is divided into two hemispheres – left and right. Popular opinion states that the left side is responsible for logical, numerical computation, while the right side is responsible for creativity, arts, emotions and visual attention. These two vastly different modes of thinking can both be considered as ‘processing’ the information, just that the data being processed is different.

Similarly, we can use this analogy when thinking about the various components of a PC, with the left hemisphere of the brain as the CPU and the right side as the GPU. However, for today’s applications, GPUs are absolutely as critical as CPUs. Not too many people need to run Excel spreadsheets faster, but many would like their photos to be more colorful, their HD movies smoother and their games more responsive. If the GPU you’re running cannot support this, then you might just be missing half of your brain, in a manner of speaking! You can read my full argument here: http://blogs.amd.com/home/2010/08/04/missing-half-your-brain/.

Myth No. 2: Manufacturing process is paramount.

Moore’s Law as applied to integrated circuits has accurately predicted that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. We are so accustomed to Moore’s Law that we are now equating  new manufacturing technology with increased transistor density, which in turn, can lead to increases in performance or battery life. However, this is not necessarily true. Today, people care about the experience their device delivers and not just the manufacturing process. Just ask anyone who has ever used an iPad – what technology was the chip powering the iPad built on? If they don’t know, they shouldn’t feel bad about it. Most of us don’t give much thought to it.

Myth No. 3: Graphics (GPU) is only for gamers.

With the tremendous shift in people using their PCs for multimedia entertainment, application developers have started to change the way they code their programs in order to take advantage of the incredible compute power locked in the GPU. That has led to significant improvements in the responsiveness of leading web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Quickly managing photo editing via Adobe Photoshop CS6, video editing with Sony Vegas Pro 11, and reduced file compression times with WinZip 16.5, all of which are GPU accelerated applications, can vastly help improve the users’ experience.

Sometimes what we learned “back then,” isn’t always applicable to the here and now. Hopefully, my blog will help correct these misperceptions about GPUs and CPUs in the market and redefine them in their own unique ways as they shape a whole new generation of computing.

Leave me a comment below or share with your network of friends. Also, to find all our latest videos, photos, blogs and more for our AMD A-Series APU click here.

Sasa Marinkovic is the Sr. Manager, Industry Marketing Programs at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

We’ve been in close contact with our technology partners, not only with well known industry and technology leaders and brands, but also with exciting up-and-coming innovators and top minds and contributors to the open source community to enable new and enhanced performance and capabilities for end users. Some new products are launching today that have been specially tuned for our next-generation AMD A-Series APUs with exclusive features and enhanced performance:

• Arcsoft is launching Arcsoft Link+, which can become the users’ complete home media command center, enabling each device to share, stream or download  media to another device on their home network. With Arcsoft Link+, consumers can stream to and from one device to another   supported device, and with a PC with our AMD A-Series APU on the home network, video enhancements such as Arcsoft’s SimHD upscaling and AMD Steady Video stabilization technologies as well as necessary file conversions and can occur  in the background. See video demo.

• Cyberlink is releasing updates to its flagship products: PowerDirector 10, PowerDVD 12, MediaShow 6, and MediaEspresso 6.5 with optimizations for the new second-generation AMD-A-series APUs, providing users with hardware-accelerated HD playback, enhanced video editing, maximum rendering and transcoding performance.

• Fluendo is launching Moovida Universe, a 3D Media Center, providing users a new way to rediscover the content in their local media library. With its tailored 3D UI powered by a video game engine, Moovida Universe Interface is capable of displaying up to 13 concurrent videos that take full advantage of our next-gen AMD A-Series APUs power.

Here are just a few other examples of some recent support for accelerated user experiences that add to the already robust and growing list of optimized applications for AMD APUs, that include  products such as recently launched Adobe Photoshop CS6:

• Video playback: VLC media player, one of the top open-source based media players on the PC, will be including integrated support for AMD Steady Video technology 2.0, making it easy for users to turn on and off video stabilization from within the VLC user interface. Future work is continuing around OpenCL™ for de-noising, with an emphasis on “quality.” Here’s what VLC had to say about OpenCL acceleration on GPUs: “VideoLan is making it easier for consumers to enjoy smooth video playback with AMD Steady Video integrated into our VLC Media Player,” said Jean Baptise Kempf, president, VideoLAN. “Thanks to the versatility of OpenCL™, we can leverage the immense parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to help enhance everyday multimedia tasks and provide a rich video experience.”

• Image processing: When it comes to editing photos, we’ve worked with the team over at GIMP to enhance the photo-editing experience, “AMD has been an outstanding colloborator, working with the open-source community to enable GIMP to leverage the GPU capabilities using OpenCL,” said Victor Oliveira, GIMP OpenCL developer. “With millions of downloads, our open-source image editing tool now has 19 high-depth filters accelerated on the AMD A-Series APUs, among others features, allowing users to do their image manipulation tasks in a faster and smoother way.”

• Productivity: We’re not only accelerating video playback and photo imaging software through OpenCL, but also file compression and encryption. Corel’s WinZip 16.5 is able to leverage both CPU and GPU resources on our new second generation AMD A-Series APUs. Corel is just as excited as we are stating: “millions of business professionals and consumers count on WinZip to zip and deliver their files quickly,” remarked Patrick Nichols, President of WinZip. “The OpenCL accelerated file performance of WinZip 16.5 on AMD A-Series APUs lets our customers zip, share and secure even the largest file sets faster than ever.”

These are just a few of the more than 100 applications that leverage the immense graphics and parallel processing capabilities of the AMD A-Series APU;, the best entertainment and gaming experience. Check out more accelerated apps at www.amd.com/coolapps. Check out all our partners below for more:

• Adobe
• Arcsoft
• BlueStacks
• Codemasters
• Corel
• Cyberlink
• DICE
• DivX
• Eidos, division of Square Enix
• Fingertapps
• GIMP
• Handbrake
• Magix
• Microsoft
• Moovida Universe by Fluendo
• Musemage by Paraken Technology
• Nuvixa
• Sony Creative
• VLC
• vReveal by MotionDSP

Gabe Gravning is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

As we approach the six month anniversary of the award-winning GCN Architecture, we thought we’d take a minute to look at what has made this one of our most successful GPU architectures of all time, starting today with a high-level overview.

Now, when people ask us for the five-second version of the story, the GCN Architecture’s success really comes down to one thing: performance. Be it in absolute frames per second, visual fidelity, or efficiency—topics we’ll cover at length in the weeks ahead—every one of the many innovations in the GCN Architecture is all about giving you the best possible product.

Moving from last generation’s AMD Radeon™ HD 6970, the GCN Architecture’s radical re-design yields radical numbers: Up to 4.5x the compute performance, up to 2.5x the tessellation performance, and up to 95% lower idle GPU power consumption.^1-3

Massive Compute Performance

Enabling 350% better compute performance was a matter of building the right GPU at the right time.³ As open compute languages like OpenCL™ and C++ AMP take flight, Graphics Core Next helps AMD build the graphics cards destined to power the killer apps of tomorrow.

We achieved such a dramatic improvement by optimizing first for higher utilization of compute resources. At every opportunity, a product based on the GCN Architecture intelligently manages workloads in a way that yields more performance to applications.

Efficiency was a corollary goal. By transitioning to the industry’s first 28nm process, we could enable an architecture that not only packed more compute units into a given space, but more complicated and capable compute units. Any of our GPUs can offer more performance than analogous products from prior architectures, and our biggest dies offer a positively stunning 3.79 TFLOPS of compute performance with the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970.

Most importantly, we made this power easy to utilize. With support for major industry languages, like OpenCL™ and C++ AMP as I mentioned, we simplified coding for the GPU with standardized scheduling and optimizations. In other words, we strive to provide consistent and predictable performance to minimize the effort of designing GPGPU applications.

The proof lies in the incredible software being produced by AMD’s partners, each supporting an array of GPU-acceleration features.

From browsers to video editing, AMD Radeon™ products can leverage GPU acceleration in some of today’s best and brightest applications.

Built for ULTRA Settings

Today’s enthusiasts expect more of their GPU than ever before, and rightfully so. The last year has introduced a string of titles with fabulous graphics, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Battlefield 3. When designing the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970, the ultimate form of the GCN Architecture, we knew we had to build a GPU that was primed to power games like these at ultra settings.

With new features like SSAA and MLAA 2.0, an industry-leading 3GB frame buffer, and blistering performance at resolutions like 5760×1080 (or higher), the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 enables the experiences gamers deserve.

From 3GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 and a slew of new image quality features, our press agree that the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 knows how to play the game.

The DNA of Efficiency

And who says a high-performance GPU can’t be green? Beginning with all of the 28nm AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series desktop products, we’ve designed and implemented a great feature called AMD ZeroCore Power technology.⁴

AMD ZeroCore Power allows a single GPU to virtually shut down when your monitor goes into the long-idle suspend state with an amber light. Instead of consuming 18-24 watts–as is the case with our past and competing products–AMD ZeroCore Power-enabled products consume less than 3W. That’s a reduction in idle power of up to 95%.³

AMD CrossFire™ technology users benefit even further. Upon exiting a game, AMD ZeroCore Power will dynamically migrate all secondary GPUs to the low-power AMD ZeroCore state. These secondary GPUs are available for activation at any time, but they consume virtually no power while they remain idle—even their fans stop spinning!

AMD ZeroCore Power technology is exclusive to AMD products, and reduces idle GPU power consumption by up to 95% versus past and competing products.

Just the Beginning

Today’s overview is just a taste of the cutting-edge technology woven into the fabric of the GCN Architecture. As we move through May into June, I’ll be exploring many and more of these topics in fine detail to fully illustrate how the world’s fastest and most advanced graphics leverages Graphics Core Next to enable truly next-gen experiences in gaming and compute.⁵

Never settle, friends.

Robert Hallock is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Substantiation:

1. Results based on average FPS measurements in SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Pro (AES256) benchmark at 1920×1080 comparing an AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 (23.1) vs. an AMD Radeon™ HD 6970 graphics (5.1) on the following system: Intel Core i7 (3.3GHz), MSI X79A-GD65, 16GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24, Windows 7 Ultimate RTM 64-bit. [GDRT-9]
2. Results based on average FPS measurements in Unigine “Heaven” benchmark at 2560×1600 set to extreme tessellation and no anti-aliasing comparing an AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 (80) vs. an AMD Radeon™ HD 6970  graphics (30.6) on the following system: Intel Core i7 (3.3GHz), MSI X79A-GD65, 16GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24, Windows 7 Ultimate RTM 64-bit. [GDRT-10]
3. Results based on average FPS measurements in SiSoftware Sandra 2010 Pro (AES256) benchmark at 1920×1080 comparing an AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 (23.1) vs. an AMD Radeon™ HD 6970 graphics (5.1) on the following system: Intel Core i7 (3.3GHz), MSI X79A-GD65, 16GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24, Windows 7 Ultimate RTM 64-bit. [GDRT-9]
4. AMD PowerPlay™, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD Radeon™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.
5. Based on GCN Architecture, the world’s first 28nm graphics architecture, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 and HD 7950 graphics achieve 3DMark® 11 scores in excess of X2700 and X2200, respectively. These results are the two highest scores achieved by single-GPU graphics cards on stock platforms as of 26 January, 2012. System configuration: Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz), MSI X79A-GD65 8D, 16GB DDR3-1600 (9-9-9-24) and Windows® 7 64-bit. Testing based on AMD Catalyst™ 8.921.2. The NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 580, NVIDIA’s highest performing single-GPU graphics card, was evaluated using NVIDIA ForceWare 290.53 BETA and scored X2124. GRDT-4

The GCN Architecture and its associated features (PCI Express® 3.0, AMD ZeroCore Power technology, DDM Audio, and 28nm production) are exclusive to the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900, HD 7800 and HD 7700 Series Graphics.

With our upcoming launch of “Trinity” (now shipping!), we are excited to report that, in addition to an outstanding multimedia experience delivered by the AMD HD Media Accelerator, users can finally game on an ultrathin-and-light notebook with great battery life.   We don’t just mean play any old game at minimal-quality settings, either—you can play today’s hottest new titles, like Battlefield 3 from DICE and DiRT Showdown from Codemasters, in stunning high definition. “Trinity” powers a brilliant gaming experience, with an increase in graphics performance of up to 70% over the competition, thanks to the latest AMD Radeon graphics technology.[i] Suffice it to say, our partners at Codemasters are excited for “Trinity” as well!

“Graphics power today’s entertainment lifestyle and with the AMD A-Series APUs, customers will have a richer visual experience when playing DiRT Showdown,” said Clive Moody, Executive Producer, DiRT Showdown. “The arrival of the Second-Generation AMD A-Series APUs delivers a superior visual quality and outstanding performance with a full panel DirectX 11® gaming experience that’s second to none.”

If you’re like Codemasters and you can’t wait to get your hands on “Trinity” then we highly encourage you to take a look at the new HP ENVY Sleekbook, just announced by HP (pictures below). As thin as 19.8 mm and starting at less than 4 pounds, the new, 15.6” HP ENVY Sleekbook, powered by “Trinity,” delivers an incredible gaming and multimedia experience with outstanding battery life. For more on the HP ENVY Sleekbook, stay tuned to the HP ENVY home page, as the HP ENVY Sleekbook with AMD “Trinity” is expected to be available in the United States on June 20 with an MSRP starting at $599.99 per HP’s recent major announcement.

For years, PC gamers have clamored for an affordable, ultrathin-and-light notebook with great battery life that is capable of playing the latest games. With “Trinity,” gamers’ dreams are finally coming true!

Neal Robison is the director of ISV Relationship Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

DiRT Showdown is a brand new dive in and drive adrenaline rush of speed, style and destruction from the creators of the multi-award winning DiRT series. Players jump into a new world of arcade racing with pick up and play controls, speeding, tricking and smashing their way to ‘Showdown’ finals to compete against rivals in front of thousands of fans in a vibrant festival atmosphere.

There are three broad categories to DiRT Showdown’s stunning world of action-sport racing. Players will use nitrous to blast past rivals and negotiate courses filled with ramps, multiple routes and obstacles in racing events. Gaming’s most advanced damage engine is pushed to its limits in demolition derby events, where players smash and crash their way to victory in jaw-dropping, bone-jarring style. Finally, in Hoonigan events gamers can demonstrate their freestyle driving skill in huge free-roaming stunt parks with new accessible controls.

In the career mode, globe-trotting Showdown players will travel from Miami to San Francisco, London to Tokyo and other famous locations earning the adulation of the crowd at hyper-energised, frenzied, unsanctioned race events. Over 50 different events across four championships challenge gamers in a variety of conditions – sun, snow, and rain -- through the day and under the floodlights at night.

With an exciting mix of licensed and bespoke cars and powered by the EGO Game Technology Platform for phenomenal graphical performance and stunning damage, DiRT Showdown will be the new standard for arcade driving delirium.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7kqc69nVv0

Features:

• The talent that brought the world Colin McRae DiRT, Colin McRae DiRT 2, The BAFTA Award winning Race Driver GRID™ and DiRT 3 (Metacritic: 87) is developing DiRT Showdown. Using the award winning EGO Game Technology Platform known for its killer visuals, weather, and damage system, DiRT Showdown sets the new technical benchmark for arcade racing thrills.
• Accessible, pick up and play controls combine with spectacular events and stunning graphics to deliver high octane, dive in and drive thrills from event one.
• Ken Block’s all new Gymkhana 4 HFHV Ford Fiesta debuts alongside a varied selection of vehicles across a range of classes. From saloons and muscle cars to pick-up trucks, hearses and vans.
• Courses are littered with obstacles, pinch points, multiple-routes and ramps.
• Players will crash, smash and bash their way through a range of demolition derby themed events.
• A new accessible handling system lets players let loose in free-roaming, freestyle stunt parks. Perform trick runs to competitive stunt events, explorations challenges and more.
• Issue Showdown Challenges so players can test themselves against their friends whether they are online or not.
• From San Francisco to Miami, Nevada to Michigan, Tokyo to London, each of DIRT Showdown’s locations delivers a unique atmosphere for a wide range of events.
• Whenever a large crash happens, players can see ‘kill cams’ from several angles showing how the carnage unfolds. In single player events, gamers can also upload clips direct to YouTube.

Developed by: Codemasters

Published by: Codemasters

© 2012 The Codemasters Software Company Limited (“Codemasters”). All rights reserved. “Codemasters”®, the Codemasters logo and “DiRT”® are registered trademarks owned by Codemasters. “DiRT Showdown”™ and “EGO”™ are trademarks of Codemasters. Ford Motor Company Trademarks and Trade Dress used under license to Codemasters. All other copyrights or trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are being used under license. Developed and published by Codemasters.

Why You Should Attend
AFDS is not a marketing event. It’s not about selling one brand or component. AFDS is where you discover the latest technology advancement from the experts who are redefining where the industry is headed.

Who Attends AFDS
The best in the industry converge at AFDS to share what they are working on and to collaborate with you. Here’s just a small sample of companies expected to attend AFDS. Microsoft, ARM, Square Enix, Nixxes Software, Corel, ALTELL, ArcSoft, MulticoreWare Inc, Adobe, ViVu, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Nuvixa.

What You’ll Learn
Get actionable, hands-on training in:

• OpenCL™
• Multi-GPU
• OpenGL
• GPU/APU

Claim your seat at our most popular sessions for gamers

Compute in the Future of Gaming
With DX11 capable hardware now the norm for gamer spec PCs and the next generation of consoles on the horizon, AAA games development is about to take a very interesting turn towards compute-based solutions.  This talk will offer an insight into some of the techniques now possible with compute and what this means for games over the next 5 years.

See David Perry, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Gaikai deliver his keynote Delivering Console Quality Video Games from the Cloud

Perry will present Gaikai’s progress on trying to help grow the video game industry by using virtual CPU and GPU cycles in the cloud.  This talk would be of interest to people interested in the topics: video games, high performance clouds, custom servers, broadband usage, IPTV, Facebook, Tablets, proximity networks, low latency experiences, low friction experiences & accessibility.

Learn more and Register

As a reminder, here are the sites you’ll need to check out to find all ten:

• http://developer.amd.com/afds/pages/default.aspx
• http://developer.amd.com/pages/default.aspx
• http://blogs.amd.com/fusion
• http://www.facebook.com/AMD/app_282531588467018
• http://semiaccurate.com/2012/04/16/two-new-keynotes-announced-for-afds/

For round two, we’re focusing on the AMD Facebook tab, the AFDS site and right here on the blog. Without further ado, here are the five clues to finding the remaining five “easter eggs”:

• Head over to the home page of the AMD Fusion blog. Keep your eye (and cursor) towards the header of the page. Clicking on a key word may remind you of “doing a barrel roll”. But, keep in mind, one click doesn’t always do the trick.
• Read about why you’ll want to attend AFDS, making sure to go through each of the key reasons, taking you all the way to the bottom of the page. There you’ll find one of AMD’s greatest social media resources.
• Check out the AFDS Facebook tab. Three times is the charm when you spot a key logo at the top of the page. Here, you’ll receive some additional clues that will help lead you to the remaining Easter Eggs.
• Also on the AFDS Facebook tab, look to “sign up and stay informed” to find the next hidden treasure. Submitting nothing at all may be a surprisingly smart move.
• In the same location as the previous clue, you’ll need to try something else to find the final egg. Where you are asked to provide your email address, you may want to enter your favorite open source programming language “For The Win”.

There you have it – combined with the first five clues, you should now have a clear map to help you find what you need in order to complete the AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt. Don’t worry, if you aren’t the first to find all ten, we will be giving away a Hewlett-Packard dv6 laptop with VISION Technology from AMD for second place, and an AMD  Radeon^TM HD 7970 series GPU for third place.

Questions? If you’ve got ‘em, leave them in the comments or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Good luck!

Travis Williams is a Public Relations Representative at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.  A PURCHASE OF ANY KIND WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING.  Open to residents of the 50 US States (DC) and Canada (excl. Quebec), 18+.  Contest begins April 23, 2012, and ends May 21, 2012.  For complete contest rules and details, visit here.

Riley Lewis is like a lot of kids today in that he spends hours in front of a computer screen.  What makes him unique is the professional grade software and hardware that is a regular part of his busy schedule.  Already an avid inventor, Riley started using SolidWorks® at the age of 11, when he used the program to do a failure analysis of his team’s entry in the prestigious Tech Challenge and helped make the design into an award winner at the event.  His participation there caught the eye of SolidWorks’ CEO, and in a blink of an eye Riley was headed to the annual SolidWorks users’ conference to learn more about his new-found passion.

Since then, with the help of AMD and other contributing companies, Riley has worked with his proud father and peers to establish a well-equipped 3D design lab for his charter school, and established an elective 3-month course on the school’s curriculum.  The lab includes 3D printer technology that allows Riley and other students to take their designs to actual prototypes during the course.

At the center of this unique learning environment are the workstations using AMD FirePro™ professional graphics cards that the students use to execute their designs in SolidWorks.  With two AMD FirePro cards in the lab, Riley and his friends have taken advantage of the tremendous graphics processing horsepower at their disposal.

“In the class we’ve designed speaker enclosures to make them sound better,” explained Riley recently.  “As part of that we did a lot of rendering work to see how it would finally look.  The AMD cards rendered things faster than anything we had used before.”

Antoine Reymond, AMD strategic alliances manager, has worked with Riley since first meeting him at the SolidWorks event and came away impressed with his tenacity to obtain the best hardware available, and his drive to share his knowledge with others his age.

“I was immediately impressed by Riley’s capacity to understand engineering problems when I first met him.  To do the kind of engineering work he is doing in SolidWorks while considering design for manufacturability or rapid prototyping is pretty amazing at any age,” says Reymond.  “It’s very rewarding to help young people who are passionate about technology in the context of sustainability and responsibility for in the world we live in.”

Next up for Riley, in-between focusing on making it through eighth-grade, is a full slate of engagements heading into the summer as he works to get others his age enthusiastic about science, design and inventing.  Future plans include a degree in mechanical engineering and at least two start-up businesses he is already planning.

We wish him all the luck and will continue to make sure that AMD FirePro professional graphics are ever-ready to back up his vision!

Bahman Dara is senior manager, worldwide marketing for AMD Professional Graphics. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

1. CodeAnalyst application runs as a native 64-bit application on 64-bit Windows OS flavors.

2. We have made several optimizations to help improve overall CodeAnalyst experience a pleasant one.

3. We have fixed quite a lot of bugs to help improve overall stability of CodeAnalyst.

We hope that this release helps you with your work efficiently and pleasantly. If you encounter across any bugs or see where AMD CodeAnalyst could be improved, please reach us through our forums or by replying this blog page.

OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used with permission by Khronos.

Read the story here:

Try to remember how your PC looked 10 years ago. Mine was grey, beige and had a green button for power. Today, the computer’s physical appearance and performance (eg. cooling) is just as important as the computational performance you get on screen. With an AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 graphics card you’re getting amazing hardware that only deserves a matching setup.

In this article I’m going to look at a couple builds that are definitely not dull grey boxes. We’ve taken our AMD CPU, RAM, and Video Cards and installed them in 3 different chassis. I just need to throw in a hard drive and wire everything together and I’ve got myself a LAN party.

All images are for illustrative purposes only and no endorsement of AMD or by AMD is implied.

Common Hardware:

Processor:  AMD FX 8150 Processor with Liquid CPU Cooling System

RAM:  AMD  Radeon™ Memory Entertainment Edition 4GB DDR3 x 2

Video Cards:  AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 graphics card x 2

Motherboard:  ASUS Crosshair V Formula

For all the following builds I’ll be using AMD hardware. This includes everything from the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 Graphics card to the AMD branded Liquid CPU Cooling System.

On to our first setup…

Setup A:
Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos II
PSU: Seasonic Platinum Series 860W

When the ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 GPU was released 2009, I was in awe. The ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 GPU was a beast; not only in sheer performance, but also in physique, spanning just over 12 inches. This graphic card was definitely no lightweight and was troublesome (if not impossible) to fit into certain chassis.

Fast forward to 2012, we have the AMD Radeon™ HD 6990 GPU and the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU. I measured these boards to be roughly 12 and 11 inches in length respectively. So for the moment the largest cards haven’t gotten bigger, but do we still have the same trouble fitting these graphics cards into a chassis?

With our first setup, there is definitely no issue fitting the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 GPU. The race-car inspired Cosmos II is a self-proclaimed Ultra-Tower. Supporting up to 10 fans and 13 HDDs, as you can see below the chassis also comfortably fits 2 of our AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU’s in AMD CrossFireX™ technology mode.

Setup B:
Chassis: Enermax Fulmo & Enermax Fulmo GT
PSU: Enermax Revolution87+ 850W

Sure, extra space is great in chassis’ for routing cables and better airflow, but if you’re like me and living space is a bit more limited, opting for a Mid-Tower over a Big Tower is a reasonable compromise.

Our 2 x AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 GPUs fit quite well in Fulmo (Mid Tower) chassis. For those of you still debating whether to go mid or big, Enermax has made it easier (or more difficult) to make the decision with a nearly identical bigger brother Fulmo GT (Big Tower).

Setup C:

Chassis:  Thermaltake Level 10 GT

PSU:  Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1200W

A big focus on this article has been on fitting the components inside the chassis’, but what if you’re looking for maximum style points? For those who want the red and black color scheme and curvy style inside and out. The Level 10 GT is a definite option.

Another thing to point out is that I’ve paired each of these chassis’ with a matching power supply unit. All selected PSUs have also gone through our AMD Gold Certification to ensure they are up to the task of running our graphic cards in AMD CrossFire™ Technology mode, but I’ll throw out some brownie points to Thermaltake with their Toughpower Grand 1200W. The design complements our AMD hardware quite nicely.

It also comes in white. (Snow Edition)

These enthusiast chassis’ definitely had little issue fitting our AMD hardware, and look great while doing so. So which setup is your favorite?

David Tjong is on the Technical Marketing team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

The sequel to Rebellion’s highly-acclaimed 2005 game Sniper Elite, Sniper Elite V2 continues to offer gamers the most authentic World War II sniping experience by putting them in the middle of war-torn Berlin amidst the frenzied final battle between German and Russian forces.

With an emphasis on learning to handle the anticipation and pressure of the hunt, players are forced to use skill, patience and cunning to achieve their missions as they find themselves facing life-altering choices.

The celebrated “bullet cam” from Sniper Elite makes its return and will be more gratifying than ever. Skilful shots are rewarded with a slow-motion sequence of the bullet running its full trajectory from barrel to target as well as featuring graphic detail of the effects of the bullet entering and destroying a target.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRJ4LkrZSeo

Features:

• Detailed sniping simulation with advanced ballistics, taking into account gravity, wind, velocity, bullet penetration, aim stability and more.
• Amazing “kill cam” technology showcases what really happens when a bullet enters an enemy’s body.
• Authentic World War II Berlin locations as well as vehicles, weapons, and uniforms modelled after the original versions.
• AMD Eyefinity support gives you full awareness of your surroundings.
• DirectX 11 support provides the ultimate visual treat.

Screenshots:

Official Website: SniperEliteV2.com

©2012 Rebellion. The Rebellion name and logo and the Sniper Elite name and logo and the Sniper Elite Eagle are trademarks of Rebellion and may be registered trademarks in certain countries. All rights Reserved. Uses Bink Video. Copyright © 1997-2012 by RAD Game Tools, Inc.

Since the launch of the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 series, AMD introduced support for DisplayPort 1.2, but it hasn’t been until CES 2012 where the technology has been demonstrated with the AMD GPUs.

Let’s take a look at some of the display technologies that were shown at CES this year.

Multi-Display Technology
Notebooks are great on the road: Portable, Wireless, and Convenient; but when you bring it home, why limit yourself to just with just one monitor? When you can have 4?

Don’t worry about messing with multiple cables. We’re talking about a single cable from your notebook. DisplayPort 1.2 enables this with Multi Stream Transport (MST) Hubs and Daisy-Chain monitors. Don’t get these confused with the DisplayPort 1.1 MST Hubs already in the market. DisplayPort 1.2 MST Hubs have support for monitors of different size, resolution, and orientation. (eg. 2 x FHD in portrait & 1 x WQXGA in landscape)

There’s no magic going on here. As you can see we have 3 monitors each individually connected to our DisplayPort 1.2 MST Hub. The only cable that is connected to the notebook is the connector on the DisplayPort 1.2 MST Hub.

Don’t get too excited just yet. This illustrated image of the DisplayPort 1.2 MST Hub is just a mockup of the possible future design. The current prototype is significantly larger and requires an external power adapter. It is expected that this technology would get smaller as the product is finalized, or perhaps even disappear if monitor manufacturers embed this technology directly into the monitor. (ie. Daisy Chaining)

4K2K resolution

Looking to move onto the next generation of display resolution?

At CES, one of the buzzwords floating around was 4K2K. 4K2K loosely refers to 4060×2160 or 3840×2160 (QFHD) resolutions, and various TV manufacturers showed their 4K2K TVs. It’s now the waiting game for them to be released. If you’re eager for a 4k2k monitor today you can pick up the Eizo Radiforce RX840 for a roughly $38,000. Although this model requires 2 DisplayPort 1.1 cable inputs.

With DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth is effectively doubled, so why do 2 cables when we can do 1? At CES, VESA demonstrated a modified version of the monitor that accepted a single DisplayPort 1.2 cable input. That’s 4096×2160@60Hz resolution with a single cable. Needless to say, that’s a lot of pixel going through a single cable.

HDMI (Yes, we haven’t forgotten about you)
Haven’t jumped on the DisplayPort bandwagon yet? Or do you want to cling onto your HDMI cables a bit longer? The AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 series has your answer for that too. Supporting the optional implementations in the HDMI specification, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 series supports up to 4096×2160@24Hz. You’ll also need a TV/Monitor that supports the same optional implementation in the HDMI specification. For example, available in the market is the Sony VPL-VW1000ES 4K2K projector that will support 4096×2160@24Hz over HDMI.

Keep in mind, with a maximum refresh rate of 24Hz, it’s recommended only for media consumption such movies or videos. If you’re looking for a smooth gaming experience you’ll want at least a 60Hz refresh rate.

So what Display Technology are you most looking forward to?

David Tjong is on the Technical Marketing team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

As part of AMD’s commitment to developer tools for heterogeneous compute platforms, I am excited to introduce you to gDEBugger 6.2.

gDEBugger 6.2 is a key milestone that adds Linux® support and a new standalone user interface that is available for both Linux® and Windows®. The major highlights of this release are:

• Support for Red Hat®, Ubuntu® and OpenSUSE™ Linux® distributions
• New standalone user interface with enhanced GUI for ease of use and better navigation
• Support for OpenCL™ kernel and API level debugging on AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards
• Support for OpenCL™ 1.2 beta drivers
• Stability and feature enhancements along with updated Microsoft® Visual Studio® Plugin

You can visit gDEBugger landing page to get more details and download it.

We value your input. If you have suggestions on how to improve our tools or if you experience any issues, let us know through our forums or comments to this blog.

Milind Kukanur is a Sr. Manager, Product Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

AMD’s second generation architecture of  core processors  codenamed “Bulldozer” was released in 2011 (products included  AMD Opteron™ 6200, AMD Opteron 4200 and FX  Processors).  These processors include a more advanced hardware prefetcher which is able to pick up more varied data access patterns than previous generation processors. 

Oracle JVMs by default use software prefetch instructions to prefetch heap memory when allocating new objects on the heap. (Java applications tend to do a lot of heap allocations).  Sometimes the software and hardware prefetching can get in each other’s way. We discovered that for most Java workloads the best performance on Bulldozer family processors could be achieved by just using the hardware prefetcher and disabling  the software prefetching.

AMD worked with Oracle to get this no software prefetch strategy into the Java 7 release (released in July 2011) as the default for these Bulldozer processors.  For those still using Java 6 or earlier releases, the same effect can be achieved by explicitly using the following option on the java command line: –XX:AllocatePrefetchStyle=0.

Tom Deneau is a Senior Member Technical Staff in the Runtimes Team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Feature highlights of the AMD Catalyst™ 12.4 driver:

Windows XP support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

• In addition to Windows 7 and Windows Vista support, Catalyst 12.4 now also introduces Windows XP (64-bit/32-bit) support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing: Level of Detail (LOD) Image Quality enhancements

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA):  Significant performance enhancements

• Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series, AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series, and AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series
• MLAA now operates up to 80% faster than previous versions

Resolved issues:

• Elder Scolls: Skyrim : flickering square corruption is no longer observed.
• Rage : Vsync is no longer disabled after task switching.
• Enemy Territory:  Quake Wars : no longer crashes when launched in High Performance Mode.
• Stalker – Call of Pripyat : flickering is no longer observed in trees with specific Catalyst Control Center settings.
• Tearing is no longer observed on the third screen in 3×1 and 1×3 Eyefinity configurations.

This is wonderful news for the millions of creative professionals using Adobe products. Adobe is launching Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6 which now includes OpenCL™ accelerated features in the Mercury Playback engine as well as Adobe® Photoshop® CS6 with breakthrough performance enabled by industry-standards with OpenCL and OpenGL acceleration in the new Mercury Graphics Engine. Benefit users can look forward to include an ever-growing array of hardware accelerated functions able to offer amazing performance and productivity.

There are a fantastic number of GPU accelerated features in the new Adobe Photoshop CS6. Here are two great examples of the incredible levels of performance that have resulted from the collaboration with Adobe to optimize for Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), AMD Radeon™ Graphics, and AMD FirePro™ Professional Graphics through the industry standard OpenCL and OpenGL API’s:

New Blur Gallery

Working directly in the Photoshop CS6 interface, users can create tilt-shift effects, keeping one point in focus and then slanting and widening/narrowing the amount of blur emanating from that point. Alternatively, the whole image can be blurred except for one focal point, or the user can drop multiple focal points anywhere in the image and then dial up the amount of blurriness each creates.

Before and After “Iris Blur” Effect. Images courtesy of Gary Wilson Photography (garywilsonphoto.com)

Imagine the amount of processing horsepower it takes to apply, say, six blur focal points on a 24-megapixel image. It could bring a non-accelerated system to its knees. However, with the Mercury Graphics Engine and OpenCL driving the feature, the editing process becomes a breeze, with the ability to render in only a few seconds. In fact, a mainstream notebook PC based on the AMD A8-3530MX APU is up to 672% faster when accelerated by the horsepower of the AMD Radeon™ graphics technology in the APU.* Notebooks with AMD A-series APUs are widely available from OEMs around the world in notebooks with VISION Technology from AMD.

Lightning Fast Liquify

The Liquify Effect has been an essential part of Photoshop for the better part of a decade, but as the tool continues to evolve and average image sizes keep expanding, the processing resources needed to support the filter have become significant. Again, most systems can perform Liquify operations, but demanding file sizes, especially on lower-end hardware platforms, may make loading and processing times inordinately long. That’s where hardware-based OpenGL acceleration comes in. Now with Liquify, you can immediately open unbelievably large images and immediately start working with more flexibility and options than ever. Quite frankly this wasn’t possible without hardware acceleration. Again, taking the example of a mainstream notebook PC based on the AMD A8-3530MX, we are seeing up to 456% faster Liquify when accelerated by AMD Radeon™ graphics technology in the APU.*

Before and After “Liquify” Effect. Images courtesy of Gary Wilson Photography (garywilsonphoto.com)

Creative Suite 6 is another great example of the work AMD and Adobe are doing to enable brilliant experiences. Find out more about the AMD-Adobe collaborations at www.amd.com/adobe .

And be sure to register for the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) June 11 – 14 in Bellevue, Where Adobe’s senior vice president and Chief Software Architect, Tom Malloy will give a keynote and Adobe will lead a handful breakout sessions on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Flash. Register now at www.amd.com/afds.

Clarice Simmons is a Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

* Testing was performed by AMD using test scripts and a 60.2 MB .psd format source file of a 5616×3744 resolution image provided by Adobe. Time to complete a RGB 300 Blur scripted render test was 51.06 seconds with GPU OpenCL acceleration on versus 394.26 seconds with GPU OpenCL acceleration off. Time to complete scripted Liquify render test was 15.57 seconds with GPU acceleration on versus 86.62 seconds with GPU acceleration off. Test system was a notebook with AMD A8-3530MX APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 6620G Graphics, 1.9GHz, 4G 1600 DDR3 Memory, Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit. SBNB-I99

The recent GCC release helps improve support for AMD Opteron™ 6200 series and AMD FX series processors, and adds support for upcoming AMD processors with the “Piledriver” core.  This is an important release for the developer community and brings significant performance improvements, new features and infrastructure enhancements over the previous versions.  A preview of the key highlights includes:

• Performance improvements  in the compiler option for maximum optimization level (-Ofast)
• ISA support including FMA3, F16C, TBM and BMI instruction sets (-m[no-]fma, -m[no-]f16c, -m[no-]tbm, -m[no-]bmi)
• Improved robustness, scalability, memory usage on link-time optimization (-flto).
• Support for OpenMP 3.1 (-fopenmp)
• Option to store local arrays on stack memory for FORTRAN (-fstack-arrays).
• Addition of C++ 11 (-std=c++11)

GCC now has optimized performance settings and compile flags for the AMD processors. These include:

• AMD processors with “Piledriver” core (options: -march=bdver2 and -mtune=bdver2)
• AMD Opteron™ and AMD FX series processors with “Bulldozer” processor core (options: -march=bdver1 and -mtune=bdver1) and
• AMD processors with “Bobcat” core (options: -march=btver1 and -mtune=btver1).

For a list of compiler options to use with AMD processors, check out our compiler quick reference guide.

Overall, GCC 4.7 runtime performance is designed to be faster than previous versions including GCC 4.6 or default versions that come with commercial Linux distributions (e.g. RHEL or SLES), such as GCC 4.4.6. If your application is sensitive to runtime performance then you might consider getting the latest version of GCC. Check out gcc.gnu.org to learn about the new updates and upgrade your compiler to the latest version.

GCC 4.7 release notes can be found here.

By the way, did I mention GNU Compiler Collection turned 25 this year… Happy anniversary GCC!

Milind Kukanur is a Sr. Manager, Product Management at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Are you gearing up for the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2012 (AFDS)? We certainly are. But preparing for the heterogeneous computing event of the year doesn’t have to be all serious business. We wanted to have some fun in the run up to AFDS, and reward some of our most clever AMD fans in the process. With that in mind, we invite you to participate in the AFDS Virtual Scavenger hunt, where you’ll need to keep your eyes peeled for some hidden tricks we’ve sprinkled around various websites. Be the first to find all 10 “Easter Eggs” and you could win an AMD-powered iBUYPOWER Gamer Extreme 579D3 Desktop PC complete with AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology. Not too shabby, huh? We also have some great runner-up prizes including a Hewlett-Packard dv6 laptop with VISION Technology from AMD for second place and an AMD HD Radeon^TM 7970 series GPU for third place.

Sites involved: The Easter Eggs are hidden across the following sites:

• http://developer.amd.com/afds/pages/default.aspx
• http://developer.amd.com/pages/default.aspx
• http://blogs.amd.com/fusion
• http://www.facebook.com/AMD/app_282531588467018
• http://semiaccurate.com

Not sure what kind of “Easter Eggs” we’re talking about? No problem. We’ll give you one for free. See the Facebook and Twitter buttons to the right? Go ahead and grab the Facebook icon (click and hold), drag it onto the Twitter icon, and let go.

Pretty cool, huh?  Now you’ve got one.  Nine more to go.

Now the task is to find the rest and take a screenshot of each “Easter Egg.” When you have 10 screenshots (one for each Egg you think you’ve found), you should submit all of the screenshots to this email address we created: AFDSeastereggs@amd.com.  You should also include your name, e-mail address, telephone number, and mailing address, and the subject of the e-mail should be “AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt Entry”

We are going to be hiding the “Easter Eggs” in two waves. There are currently five of them in the wild right now (you’ve got one already). Here is some more help to lead you on your way:

The First Five:

1. See above about Facebook & Twitter button freebie. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
2. The AFDS home page is a good place to start. Get the super saver discount on registration and have AMD pick up $200 on your (hidden) tab, and you’ll be able to soak up all the OpenCL news (hint) you could ever want.
3. Look for a trademark on OpenCL Zone at Developer Central. Clicking on it may take you in the right direction.
4. SemiAccurate does a nice job highlighting two new keynote speakers at AFDS ’12.
5. Head over to the AFDS Facebook tab and focus on the live Twitter stream. Similar to SemiAccurate, we’ve highlighted a key message. Don’t overthink it. The most important information is always at the top.

In two weeks from today we’ll set the next five ”Easter Eggs” loose, and will leave more clues right here on the AMD Fusion blog. We’ll also provide regular updates to help you out on Facebook at www.facebook.com/amd and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/amd_unprocessed. Bookmark all of these sites and check back often.  Be sure to hold off sending in your entries until we have released all the Easter Eggs.

And of course it wouldn’t be a contest without some guidelines. See below for the fine print, including official rules and details.

Well… what are you waiting for? It’s a race – go!

Travis Williams is a Public Relations Representative at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.  A PURCHASE OF ANY KIND WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING.  Open to residents of the 50 US States (DC) and Canada (excl. Quebec), 18+.  Contest begins April 23, 2012, and ends May 21, 2012.  For complete contest rules and details, visit here.

by Trevor Budge, University Recruiter

An elevator pitch (or speech) is a simple term coined to illustrate a measurable amount of time that you might have to make a strong and effective impression on a person. On an elevator, you can probably assume you’ll have two minutes or less to make the pitch as you move from the top floor to the bottom, or vice versa.

Always Expect the Unexpected
Take this actual example that recently happened to my fellow AMD recruiter, Spencer Coles.

I was on the first floor waiting for the elevator on my way to go meet with a hiring manager. I was checking the room number on my phone, and in my peripheral vision, I saw AMD CEO Rory Reed. I turned to shake his hand and introduce myself. As we entered the elevator, he asked me about recruiting. I gave him a casual answer: “It is going great.”  He then said, “Really, tell me why it is going great.” Suddenly, I realized this wasn’t the casual “How are you doing,” but an actual opportunity to make an impression. What was going to be a short elevator ride became a 30-second overview of the successes and failures of recruiting. As the door opened on my floor, I said goodbye and made my exit. As I started to walk away, Rory stopped the elevator door from closing and said, “Remember…only the best talent.”

While summarizing the event, Spencer followed up with this advice: “Always expect the unexpected.”

In this particular example, Spencer had 30 seconds to make an impression on AMD’s CEO, Rory Reed. To make a stronger point, the impression he made had the high potential to stick for AMD’s entire Global Talent Acquisition community. Fortunately, Spencer held his own and left a good impression. (At least he said he did!)

Truth be told, the elevator pitch will most likely take place elsewhere, such as next to your cubicle, at a conference, in an interview or even at a party. The pitch can come in handy in a variety of situations, such as landing your next job, deal or even a date.

How to Create the Perfect Pitch

For starters, I recommend focusing on the importance of an elevator pitch for a job interview. Not only is this a good place to begin, it can be the foundation for all of your other pitches. In most interviews that I’ve participated in, each candidate is asked or encouraged to tell something about him- or herself. It might happen during the small talk before you sit down for the formal interview or during the interview itself. The point is, always be prepared.

The best advice for preparing an elevator pitch, in my opinion, comes from Harvard Business School’s HBS Elevator Pitch Builder. Summarized below are their five simple steps for creating the perfect pitch:

1. Who: Talk about who you are. What would you most want the listener to remember about you?
2. What: Here’s your chance to create a tag line. Allow the listener to understand how you or your company would add value.
3. Why: Show the unique benefits that you and/or your company bring to business.
4. Goal: Describe your immediate goals with a time frame.
5. Analyze: Write down your pitch and count the number of words; estimate how long it takes to say it and pay attention to the number of repeated words.

I would add a sixth step and encourage you to practice your pitch on friends, family members, strangers or anyone else who will listen until it becomes second nature. This will not only help you make your pitch real, it will also come in handy when you are caught alone in the elevator with your CEO.

Trevor Budge is a University Recruiter for AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

The 2012 AMD A-Series APU helps improve on virtually every aspect of our current A-Series APUs while doubling the performance-per-watt over our previous generation. It enables Brilliant HD, amazing productivity and accelerated applications across a spectrum of form factors – including ultrathin and mainstream notebooks, embedded devices and desktops.

Not to be outdone, our new essential notebook platform codenamed “Brazos 2.0” also began shipping to OEMs last quarter! It builds on the success of our highly successful 2011 Low Power Platform, bringing many new features, excellent performance and extended battery life to entry-level products.

Stay tuned: “Trinity” and “Brazos 2.0” systems will be available globally soon!

Phil Hughes is a Senior PR Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

>> Download Now (5760X1200)

Other resolutions:
1920X1200
6000X1200
9600X1200
960X640 (iPhone)

If you’re unfamiliar with OpenCL™, it’s the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Meaning, it greatly improves speed and responsiveness by taking advantage of untapped resources (i.e. the GPU) for parallel compute across a number of applications from gaming and medical software, and now with specific functions like processing effects and transitions when video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

AMD and Adobe have been hard at work collaborating on integrating OpenCL into Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. In fact, I ran into Adobe’s Director of Video Product Management, Bill Roberts at the Adobe booth (#SL2624) here at NAB, where they are showcasing the OpenCL powered real-time editing and effects, and he reiterated their enthusiasm for bringing open standards to life through Adobe Premiere Pro:

“AMD has been a vital partner in helping us bring GPU-acceleration through OpenCL™ to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on current generation MacBooks everywhere. I think our customers will find the enhanced Mercury Playback Engine to be a dramatic improvement and a great benefit to users who will experience an immediate dramatic performance increase with this new release software release . We couldn’t be more excited about the results of our work with AMD on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.  We’re definitely looking forward to continuing our work with AMD on future enhancements to Adobe Premiere Pro.” – Bill Roberts, Director of Video Product Management, Adobe

So, Adobe is excited. AMD is excited. But what about you, are you excited that Adobe Premiere Pro works dramatically faster with sweeping performance and stability enhancements to the natively 64 bit, muti-core-CPU optimized and GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine (comments are ALWAYS welcome below if you’d like to answer my rhetorical question)?

If GPU acceleration, OpenCL optimization and multi-core processing aren’t exactly the kind of thing that makes your hair stand up, let’s try this: with OpenCL powered GPU-acceleration on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, effects like color correction, image control, perspective, dissolve and more than three dozen other OpenCL™ optimized effects bring real-time editing and effects to life so that you never have to break your creative flow. And if that wasn’t enough, it also accelerates the export from your source format to your preferred destination format by up to 241%* for quick and easy distribution and publishing.

If you couldn’t make it to the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas this year, I strongly suggest that you join AMD and Adobe at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) June 11 – 14 in Bellevue, WA. Adobe’s senior vice president and Chief Software Architect, Tom Malloy will provide a keynote, and the Adobe Premiere Pro team will lead a breakout session on OpenCL and Adobe Premiere Pro. You can register and check out more details at www.amd.com/afds. I hope to see you there.

That’s what I’m pumped about. What about you? What new features and design capabilities are you excited about? Dynamic timeline trimming? Warp stabilizer effect? Expanded multi-cam editing? Uninterrupted playback? Rolling shutter repair effect? Or one of 20+ other new capabilities I didn’t mention? Those aren’t rhetorical, so feel free to answer below.

Andrew Baum is a Senior Developer Relations Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

*Testing was performed by AMD using a test project provided by Adobe in DVCPro format, 31 seconds, 1280×1080, 29.97fps with export to H.264 format, max render quality. With OpenCL (GPU acceleration) enabled, the export took 1:04.2 seconds. With CPU only, the export took 3:39.3 seconds. Test system was a MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8 GB 133 MHz DDR RAM, AMD Radeon™HD 6750M graphics with 1024MB of video RAM, and Mac OS Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b)

The bullx R family of supercomputers are available in a wide range of configurations and are an excellent choice for research facilities and industrial customers. Optimized for extreme computing, bullx features both compute and service nodes that are based on the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors.

These server platforms are scalable, allowing researchers the ability to configure to their specific needs, from a small number of nodes up to very large clusters that can deliver hundreds of teraflops of performance.

With up to 16 cores per processor and support for four channels of DDR3 memory, the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor is a natural choice for these platforms that run supercomputing applications that can help academic and government researchers handle a variety of tasks.  And in the commercial sector, applications like computational fluid dynamics and crash test analysis can be tackled by the bullx systems.

Bull will offer three new models of the bullx:

The bullx R424 D3 is a 2U dense server that features four 2P servers in a single chassis, delivering up to 128 cores and over a teraflop in a single system.[1] With a host of maintenance and redundancy features, these systems are designed to not only deliver strong performance, but also to help make sure that your processing is not interrupted. These systems can also host a single GPU per 2U chassis.

The bullx R423 D3 server is a service node, which works with the bullx R424 D3 compute nodes. Through its advanced connectivity functions, extensive storage options, and redundancy functions, the system helps bring reliable and efficient cluster administration services. And if your applications require more memory, connectivity or internal storage, the bullx R423 D3 can also be used as an ‘enhanced’ compute node. The bullx R428 D3 server is a highly dense node that features 4 AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors. With a memory of up to 512 GB (32 DIMM, or 8 DIMM per socket), it is especially well suited to memory-hungry applications. Designed specifically to act as a compute node, it can offer an extremely competitive price/performance ratio. This model is well-targeted at applications where a high level of inter-CPU communication is required with four processors in a single node, helping to cutt down on the latency normally experienced by having to step outside of the node to access data from other CPUs.

Overall these new servers are an excellent addition to a growing family of high-performance compute systems already available using the AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor; including members of the Dell PowerEdge Server family, the HP ProLiant server family, and the Cray XE6, XE6m and XK6 supercomputers.

Three former Bull employees reunited in Beijing: Hongchen Yu from China, Jerome Carpentier from Paris and John Fruehe from the US.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.