By Terry Makedon, Manager of Software Marketing at AMD.

Today we are launching AMD A-Series APU for desktops, an incredible, forward-looking product that caters to the changing appetite of the PC audience. Often it is quite easy to focus on this exciting new technology as just a piece of hardware, however, the software that drives it is just as significant. All the glory goes to things like the SIMD Engines, the Ultra-Threaded Dispatch Processor, the Memory Controller, the UVD, or the CPU cores. However there is an unsung hero involved, often neglected, usually invisible, but year after year this “champion of the user” consistently delivers free performance updates, stability improvements and new features. The APU without this hero is like a car without gasoline, or a smartphone without an operating system. I would like to bring this tireless gladiator to the forefront and introduce it to everyone. Enter AMD VISION Engine Software.

For many years AMD (and formerly ATI) have been developing and consistently updating our GPU software. Now with the advent of the APU, we take that same code base and expand its functionality to the areas of APU’s. What is enabling the APU to do all its tasks (whether computational or graphical) is AMD VISION Engine Software.

The components of this software suite are as follows:

1. AMD Catalyst™ graphics driver
2. AMD compute driver  for OpenCL™
3. AMD VISION Engine Control Center

We have a commitment to update this suite 12 times a year, and each update will be Microsoft WHQL certified. Each update is designed to provide some combination of the following:

1. Performance
We have dedicated engineers who analyze and optimize applications. This means that the product you buy today can be faster a year down the road. Free performance upgrades – what a concept – I wish my car did that!

2. Stability
This one is easy – we fix bugs. We strive to have as stable of a driver as possible. The way to achieve that is to continually release bug fixes to our users.

3. Innovation
New Features. Plain and simple. It is with almost complete certainty that I can tell you that if you buy an APU today by next year it should be able to do new things that it wasn’t able to do before. We work on roadmaps that enable incremental functionality and release the new functionality as quick as we can code it (and of course test it).

Just to recap, if you buy an A-Series APU today, it will benefit from free software updates via the AMD VISION Engine Software suite, and much like a fine wine will very likely get better with time. In fact last year alone the various software components got downloaded over 50 million times (hey that’s more than the population of Canada!). To get all this goodness, all you have to do is, visit the “Support & Drivers” area of www.amd.com, or follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com\catalystmaker

Terry Makedon is the Manager of Software Marketing at 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.