So what is driving the sea-change, and how will it impact what we can expect in 2012? Here are my predictions:

• Consumers Will Take Off Into The Cloud

More people will be going to the cloud. While cloud-based applications are clearly not new, consumers don’t see them as part of the cloud – just applications from their browser. Apple will make the cloud seem like a real solution to consumers in 2012.

As our mobile devices are getting bigger and are becoming more and more important to our day-to-day lives, having copies of that data will become both inconvenient and take too long through a USB cord. Consumers will want to know in real-time that their data is safe.

• Consumers Will Demand More Natural Interfaces

The naysayers are trying to gather the small-minded around their campfire to joke about Siri. But regardless of how well Siri does, it will have two key effects.

First, it will prove to consumers that there are better ways to input than just keyboards and remotes. And second, it will usher in a new realm of artificial intelligence applications – of AI systems. I first tried to sell an AI application 20 plus years ago and we joked that if you asked two AI systems the same question, you would get two different answers. That’s not good in medical or insurance claims but its fine for directions to the local McDonalds. Or a train timetable or a weather forecast.

• Finally, Micro-Segmentation, Maybe

Both of these trends together get you to a world where true micro-segmentation may be more possible. Self-selecting consumers ask for what they want and businesses get to position themselves against those needs. But to do that successfully, businesses will need to be in the data stream, and be able to clearly communicate their message.

What’s Next For Me?

I too find myself at an inflection point. While I am truly excited by the prospects for AMD, there are projects in my life outside of AMD that offer me compelling opportunities. As some of you know, one of those projects is the website The 3 Minute Mentor; I have been planning a book based on the website for some time.

One of the site’s lessons is that life is a series of choices. While making choices can be hard, it’s something we all need to do. The time has come for me to choose to pursue the next phase of my career. It has been a great four years for me at AMD, and I am leaving happy with what the team has achieved.

I will remain at AMD to assist with marketing organization transitions and the 2012 planning cycle. After that, I will put on my shades and head off into the Texas sun.

I hope you continue to follow me via The 3 Minute Mentor site. In the meantime, I wish each and every one of you Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year.

Thank you.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer for AMD. His postings and comments made on The Three Minute Mentor website 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. 

“I’ve looked at cloud computing from both sides now,

From up and down, and still somehow,

It’s cloud illusions I recall,

I really don’t know cloud computing, at all.”

-        (With apologies to) Joni Mitchell, 1969

 I searched for the word “cloud” on Google recently and it returned 762m hits. It wasn’t until I got somewhere in the second page of searches that something relating to weather came up. Weather aside, what, really, is “the cloud”− much less “cloud computing”?

To answer this seemingly simple question I referred to Wikipedia, which defines “cloud computing” as, “… the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).”

OK, I get that. But why is that different from timesharing computing, hosting, or grid computing? More importantly, if I’m a business owner or IT manager looking to implement a cloud solution, why do I need to know the answer to that question?

Let’s take a look.

How We Got Here

Timesharing computing was similar to cloud computing from a usage point of view but implied access to one computing device that was shared, not a range of computers that were connected together. You tended to “dial-into” to use one application and signed off when you were done.  However you connected to the resources, they were not re-deployable to other users and your data was not portable.

In hosting, you still used a service that either “hosted” or ran your application, or perhaps you used a generic version of an application. The ultimate version of this in my view is SalesForce.com. I am sure they would see themselves as a “cloud provider” − but isn’t it just an extreme sort of hosting?

Grids, on the other hand, tend to not have applications in them – unless you put them there. For years, the problems with distributed computing were the expense of the computers, the speed of the network and different computers running different versions of software. Over time, the industry has solved the expense problem and is a long way toward addressing network bandwidth challenges. And today we use open standards to address the problem of different computers running different versions of software.

While you don’t necessarily need to know the type of computer in “the grid”, you do need to understand the nature of the standards to submit a job.

Sounds technical – yes it does, and grids tend to be the domain of pure math, physics and engineering. They are designed to run specific kinds of applications that don’t share well – these applications tend to want all of the resources of the grid when they are running because they are solving big, hairy problems whose speed is directly dependent on the underlying compute and interconnect speed of the grid. And that means that most grids are designed to solve one class of problem and to run only one “job” at a time.

So that gets us back to “cloud computing”. Using the Wikipedia definition, all the other types of computing could be thought of as “clouds” too. My guess is they probably are.

What’s more, I don’t think it matters.

Cloudy Ahead

Let’s go further and argue that that definition is perhaps wrong or just insufficient. If we are going to understand the next generation of computing, while we can call it “cloud computing,” in reality we need to look less at the hardware and more at the actual workload – or, more to the point, to the methodology that is being executed with cloud deployments.

When we look at how the methodology is being executed, we see some things that are common and consistent: easily provisioned systems, virtualization, power efficient dense environments, flexible platforms, a focus on agility and dynamic allocation.  When you consider these factors in varying combinations, you see the broad range of solutions that can be called “cloud”:

• In today’s Web 2.0, social-networked world, we readily consider Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Amazon as “cloud” destinations. Each builds on a classic three-tier architecture, creating a large system footprint − but with industry-standard x86 technology. 
• With Web-based business applications offered by companies like Salesforce.com and Google, the need to run applications locally is removed, allowing data instead to be stored and manipulated “in the cloud”. One impact of this is that updates can be deployed instantaneously, driving change in client computing.
• And many companies today are turning to the “private cloud” to allow them to be more agile, respond more quickly to business changes and improve return on investment. In some cases, business units are being empowered to self-provision and deploy servers. Think of this as virtualization on steroids: where virtualization moved the deployment time of servers from weeks to hours; with private cloud it moves from hours to minutes.

 My Cloud, Your Cloud

How you look at the cloud is, of course, also a function of whether you are a user or a provider.

As a cloud user, I shouldn’t really care how the content is provided − I care that it’s scalable, flexible (no big upfront definitions of what it can and cannot do) and is “on demand”.  Mostly I just want it to be variable – in how I use it and pay for it, and in the applications I push to it.

But if you are a cloud provider, you want to give your customers the service levels they want − and the variability they demand. If your cloud model is going to be priced right, you will need to smooth demand over time, be both ultra-available yet be able to accurately charge for real-time usage. The real cloud providers don’t do single-user clouds, they do multi-use or multi-tenant clouds − and they design their clouds to address a specific range of applications very well.

The trick for these cloud providers is to minimize costs while ensuring customers’ applications run as promised; completely generic hardware infrastructure won’t meet your goals.

One Size Does Not Fit All

These cloud providers will not be like Google and Amazon − and that’s not a surprise, right?

Many, if not most, will be about small applications; in a previous world we would have called these “Objects”. These are packages of application and data that travel together and can be executed around a virtualized infrastructure. When we explore these packages we see some common elements:

• They are based on open standards, which can be executed on a wide range of computing devices and in a wide range of locations.
• Sometimes these work packages will be done remotely, sometimes locally and more often than not at both places.
• The data will need to be accessible regardless of the device or location from which you want to access it.
• The applications will therefore need to be highly-threaded and work with multiple types of processing cores (given that one size tends not to fit all).

While we like to believe that everything works the same on open standards, the truth is that too many options makes life too complex. Therefore we can start to make some assumptions about the basics of what will run the cloud.

From a hardware perspective, there will be various types of cores but I’m willing to bet that x86 will be the dominant processing platform for servers and mainstream clients for many years to come – and yes, ARM for ultra-low powered clients. While there may be other type of servers (including maybe one day ARM-based ones), and there may be other types of low-powered clients, in reality computing moves much more slowly than the media might have you believe. Just check the size of IBM’s mainframe business today – smaller but still very much there.

In terms of operating systems, you would have to bet on four main players – Windows, Linux (or the LAMP stack), iOS and Android. What about WebOS and RIM? Like IBM’s mainframes, there may be a place for them but it will not be the main focus.

In terms of applications programming and languages – how things have changed. Three years ago we would have said Java, Ruby and some others would make the cloud go. While they may play a huge part, I suspect HTML5 is the real one to watch. I think we are just at the start of this revolution.

And I could go on and talk about databases and other middleware, but like all the other parts of the stack, they will consolidate too.

Ease of Engagement

So where does this leave AMD? Right where it has always been – which now seems to be in the middle, edge and the ends of the cloud. I don’t know who the next Google or Amazon will be, but – if the current trend holds – it will rely on AMD.

Chances are you got to this page through “the cloud”, and if so you used AMD along the way. You may be reading this blog on an AMD VISION Technology PC, or through our AMD Radeon™ graphics technology and it may even be hosted on a server powered by the new AMD Opteron™ processor.  

AMD is at the heart of your favorite social media sites, search engines, application providers, network providers, device providers and even a large chuck of gaming consoles.

And AMD technology is designed to provide you with a better overall experience, from making those devices run faster, to enabling longer battery life, to creating superior visual experiences. From the AMD Fusion Family of Processors in your PC to the AMD Opteron-based multi-threaded servers, “the cloud” may feel like an illusion − but it’s made real with help from AMD.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

Two thoughts are applicable here.

First, I am not going to get into a spending fight on advertising because our competitor already spends − just on advertising − more than twice our entire marketing budget. So, there’s that.

But secondly, what people are really thinking or asking is:  “why doesn’t AMD advertise on television in North America?”

Relative to the rest of the world, North America is a pretty unique PC market, in that a small number of retailers define the market. Because of that, television advertising is not just about a 30 second spot in the middle of your favorite TV show – campaigns need to be sustained.  And that’s expensive.

But regardless of that, the main point I want to make is that I think a better use of our marketing money is to spend it on Web, Point of Sales and other promotional approaches. The most commonplace promotional is the circular that comes to you each weekend. Do you see that lovely AMD VISION logo?

Well, that is advertising.

We are also very active online, which we know is where our customers research and learn about new products. Consider all the videos you can see about our recent Guinness World Record for the highest overclocking frequency for a CPU that’s aimed at enthusiasts. And if you shop at Best Buy in Canada you can learn all about VISION Technology from AMD and what an APU-based system can do for you. We believe the Web is very influential as a tool to affect preference.

Outside of North America the market looks very different and so, accordingly, our advertising strategy reflects those markets. Here are just some of the pictures I have taken over the last year from trips around the world.

In emerging markets we experiment with new ideas and approaches. One example is this television commercial show in India. And this is a street in Taiwan.

So when people ask me if AMD advertises, the answer is: yes of course we do. But it’s targeted, and our approach varies based on the region.

Two final thoughts:

1. The Taiwan street picture was actually a video I took on my smartphone which was converted into a panorama shot by vReveal’s Panorama application. You can get it here. This is just one of many applications accelerated for AMD VISION technology.
2. And you can see us on TV in North America almost every week – if you watch Austin City Limits on your local PBS station.  The online version frequently shows a short AMD video that runs before each episode.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

But rather than just trumpet the news, I thought I’d use this opportunity to share what I’m calling the Fusion Top 10 list.

1. Overall, AMD has experienced a 50 percent increase in total notebook design wins over the previous generation of AMD platforms.  To date, AMD has secured more than 300 design wins (notebook, desktop, embedded) based on the AMD Fusion Family of APUs.
2. We saw a 57% year-on-year increase in notebook design wins for our top OEM partners (HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, MSI, Toshiba, ASUS, Sony and Samsung).  
3. The AMD E-series Fusion APU-based Lenovo ThinkPad x120e was one of the top selling commercial notebooks among distributors targeting small and medium businesses, exceeding demand forecasts.
4. HP, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, Samsung and ASUS all have Llano-based notebooks available and shipping today (though currently in North America only).
5. The popular A-Series APU-based HP DV6 is widely available throughout North America, including online at Amazon.com and on the shelf at Best Buy alongside the Toshiba C770 and L750 notebooks.
6. AMD has shipped nearly 12 million APUs, and sold more than five million of the popular C- and E-Series APUs in Q2 2011 alone.
7. We launched the AMD Fusion Z-Series APU to enable the industry’s best video and graphics experience for tablets. We marked the completion of a top-to-bottom APU product stack for 2011 with the launch of the A-Series APU in notebook and desktop platforms in June 2011.
8. 11 of the world’s top 12 notebook OEMs are shipping AMD Fusion APU-based products.
9. AMD Family of APUs have won more than 35 industry awards (A-Series = 20 awards; C- & E-Series = 15 awards) for silicon innovation, APU performance and OEM designs using AMD Fusion APUs
10. If you want the world’s most amazing graphics on your notebook (and who wouldn’t?), you need one powered by an AMD graphics processor.

Are you taking part in the Fusion era of computing?

During an address by the honorable Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India , Shri. Sachin Pilot, he explored the extent to which your life is determined by the family into which you are born. For many in the emerging world in particular, your parents may be the single biggest element that defines how challenging – or rewarding – your life may be. If your parents can’t read, the chance is you will not be able to either.

He referred to this as the “Ovarian Lottery”, a term that has been credited to Warren Buffet. 

As a dyslexic, I am always sensitive to the idea that people often connect intelligence with the ability to read and write. And I wonder how much brain power is wasted in this world, not because people are not smart and creative, but because reading and writing are typically gateways to knowledge. For those of us fortunate enough to have been born into families that ensured we were educated, we take this for granted.

In India, less than 20% of the population has access to the Internet, and for the country to achieve its potential, its leaders will need to find a way to bridge this digital divide. That’s clearly a big challenge, but addressing it has such important implications.  Because regardless of whether you can read, if you can see then you can both understand and analyze.

In fact, researchers at the Visual Teaching Alliance have found that while we can understand words at a rate of about 150 a minute, we can process pictures and video between 400 to 2000 times faster than that.  So while wide-spread literacy is a very important goal, providing access to the technology that can foster wider understanding and knowledge is something that plays a role here as well.

Be Brilliant

Challenger brands tend to make the market less about themselves and more about what they can enable. Think for a moment about some of the better known dominant brands, and you’ll realize that your associations are more about the company, as opposed to how they enrich your life.  AMD is of course a challenger brand, and one of the ways we try to differentiate our technology is by helping you “Be Brilliant.”

We do this because we understand that the quality of the graphics has a huge impact. If you have ever used a high-definition HP Halo video conferencing system, you understand how different the experience is from Skyping on your PC. And this is not only true for video conferencing or gaming, but also for learning, education and training.

I believe this “brilliance” has the power to bridge the gap between playing and learning. Which takes me back to AMD’s potential for even greater positive impact. As you know, this year we launched two families of processors, the AMD Fusion APUs. What you may not know is that APUs have the potential to extend the penetration of PCs to those people in the world who currently don’t have access to a PC.

Affordable Brilliance

AMD has a history of lowering the barriers of access to people around the world by enabling new price points. For instance, we were the first to enable a PC for less than $1000 at a time when they were much more expensive. The AMD Fusion APU continues that tradition of affordability.

At the lower-end, AMD Fusion APUs are enabling superior graphics experiences at price points that previously simply couldn’t provide that level of experience.  And our APUs, which support the latest DirectX 11 graphics, are designed to optimize the visual experience and the length of the battery life, something that also gives AMD  Fusion-based systems the potential to reach more people.

Do What You Can

I am not so naive as to believe that a processor can solve world literacy.  But we do know that technology does have a positive, lasting impact and will continue to play an important role in helping emerging countries advance and grow.  We now understand, for example, that miles per gallon is a better metric for the planet than zero to sixty.

Perhaps now is the time to also expand our thinking about PCs and other devices as having greater potential to help bridge the world’s digital divide, and to measure them along those lines

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

I suspect the tablet and tablet-like device market will grow to offer options and choices in the same way there are more than one type of car, more than one type of phone and, in fact, more than one type of just about anything.  We like choice. Some of us in fact gravitate away from the most popular in favor of something more unique.

And I think most people get this. Now, as a follower of this blog you’re likely into technology and like to dig a bit deeper than most. So you may, for example, wonder whether the market will support more than one operating system (“OS”) on tablets. More pointedly, on tablets, is there room for Microsoft Windows , and could that be on an X86 device? 

I thought it was time to see for myself, so while on a recent short vacation, rather than taking my PC I travelled with an MSI 110W tablet running Windows – which is an OS we use at AMD. I essentially put my work desktop on the tablet, which is powered by an AMD Z-Series low powered APU running Windows 7 Professional.

Spec for Spec

The “spec police” (as I like to call them) can worry about actual weight and size comparisons between an iPad and the MSI 110W, but rather than do that here, think about your PC. While I was using a pre-product model, reports are that the production version of the MSI 110W will be powered by an AMD Z-01 dual-core processor, AMD Radeon™ HD 6250 graphics, have a 10.1″ 1280 x 800 capacitive IPS multi-touch display, run Windows 7, and feature 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 32GB SDD (mSATA), 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, SRS audio, mini HDMI, USB 2.0, SD card reader, various sensors, 1MP / 1.3MP front and rear cameras and a 2-cell 4200 mAh, 31Wh battery (6 hours). It’s 0.61″ / 15mm thick and weighs 1.8 lbs / 816g.

So that’s pretty much a standard PC without a keyboard, but weighing less than 2lbs. Compare that to the PC I usually travel with, which I really love: the Lenovo x120e (with our AMD E Series APU), which is about 3Lbs. The 50% more weight offers a little better battery life and a keyboard.

The 110W also features MSI’s Easy Face Software, allowing you to log in by showing your face to the tablet’s webcam. The software employs your unique facial features to remember your password so you don’t have to. And, the 110W is based on the Trusted Platform Module where files and data are automatically encrypted for maximum security when running Microsoft Windows® 7 Professional or higher. 

So, what was my experience with the new MSI tablet? I’ll get to that, but first let’s think a bit more about OS’s.

Windows and iOS

Windows is not the same thing as iOS. More to the point, Windows applications are not the same as iOS Aps.

On your iPhone and iPad you have a series of “apps” that really are functions, with you as the application that integrates them. In Windows you have full integrated applications that have multiple functions and capabilities combined into them. You wouldn’t think twice about using three different apps to get the answer to something, but you would be frustrated if you couldn’t word-process while in Excel.

That’s the difference to me between a phone OS and a general purpose OS platform.

The practical difference for business users is that the traditional tablet just doesn’t open some attachments, messes up the view of some others, and doesn’t work with some popular business systems. It’s great for email triage, but if you are on Microsoft Exchange (and don’t have an infinite mailbox) you are going to have to get your PC at some point.

Now you’re thinking: but what if everything was in the cloud?

Well, it’s not. And even if it were, when I’m traveling for work mostly the only cloud that’s available are the ones the plane flies past. Practically speaking, if your business uses Microsoft, you need a PC.

Of course, let’s not forget that there are many things that the traditional tablet does very well, like movies, music and Angry Birds − all of which worked very well on the MSI. In additional, I installed an early version of BlueStacks software and that gave me access to lots of Android applications running on the PC.

And while we’re thinking about this, what about x86 and ARM?

Well, we can speculate all we want but in reality we are all going to have to wait and see. We don’t know what will and will not be backwards compatible and whether the ARM version of Windows will be useful for home and business. If you can wait a year or so, we will know.

Windows on a Tablet

 The Windows experience on the table wasn’t without its issues. I had challenges with the virtual keyboard on the pre-production version I was using. For example, while I liked its predictive guessing, in lots of cases there was no visual feedback that I had actually pressed a key.

The touch generally works well but sometimes with Windows you just need a cursor. Fortunately, MSI provides a little joy stick-like button that really worked well. To left click you just keep your finger on the screen which brings up the menu.

Room for More than One

As you know, I really like my iPad and I wouldn’t travel without it. But I have to travel with a PC too. The iPad is too limited as a mobile office. I believe that is true for most business users and may even be true for many home users.

The MSI is just the start of the real wave of Windows tablets and I was really impressed with it. I suspect Windows 8 may just be the answer to the few challenges I did have. I am told we might see early versions of Windows 8 early next year, and I will update this view then. The BlueStacks software is also expected continue to get better and better and provide support for more and more Android applications.

At the end of the day, most business people have to bridge their work-mobility and their personal-life-mobility. So the question is really not, “Will there only be one?” Rather it’s, “Will there really only be one for me?”

I don’t know. But I am starting to get excited by the possibilities.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

Originally intended to be an intimate forum for developers to discuss the future of AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), our expectations were far exceeded by the number and excellence of the attendees, partners, industry analysts and press from around the world who came to teach, share and learn. We saw event attendees participating in the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #Fusion11, and those who couldn’t attend joined us on our live webcasts.

Developers sat in on technology sessions and keynotes from AMD Corporate Fellow Phil Rogers, Jem Davies, ARM Fellow and VP of Technology, Herb Sutter, Microsoft Principal Architect, Graham Brown, Chief Technology Officer of Corel and Eric Demers, AMD VP and Graphics Division CTO.

Our partners demonstrated futuristic, visually rich and high-performance multimedia, gaming, user interface, graphics, program modeling and enterprise software and hardware. A few of the highlights included:

• MotionDSP: Sean Varah demonstrated video steadiness with one quick fix. Check out this panoramic photo MotionDSP created of the A-Series Launch event at the Experience Music Project.
• VUDU:  A demonstration of VUDU, a video live-streaming provider who delivers a cinema-like HD experience at home, showed how AMD and VUDU provide a great viewing experience when viewed on a PC with AMD Image Enhance Technology.
• Unlimited Realities: David Brebner showed touch screen warping tessellation with Ultimate Realities’ Fingertapps software, designed for touchscreen-enabled PCs and Windows-based tablet devices.
• ArcSoft: ArcSoft Inc., a multimedia software provider, ramped up users’ HD viewing experience with OpenCL enhancements to its bestselling products: TotalMedia Theatre 5, MediaConverter 7, and the upcoming ShowBiz 5.
• Corel: Corel announced that consumer video-editing software VideoStudio Pro X4 now comes equipped with a free performance enhancer, powered by AMD Fusion APUs.
• CyberLink: CyberLink demonstrated a sneak peak of their next version of PowerDirector that includes OpenCL acceleration for effects and blending, as part of their plan to design for heterogeneous computing.
• Insyde BIOS: InsydeH2O™ UEFI BIOS is now complete with support for AMD Fusion APUs to provide users with quality HD graphics and high-quality supercomputing.

Our time in Seattle was also memorable because we celebrated one of the biggest product launches in AMD’s history. At the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum we celebrated the launch of the AMD A-Series APU. Currently shipping and scheduled to appear in more than 150 notebooks and desktops, the new APUs enable brilliant HD graphics, supercomputer-like performance and over 10.5 hours of battery life*. You can find the images of the fun on our Flickr page. A special guest, well-known director Robert Rodriguez, joined us and shared his creativity and love of technology. We thought he couldn’t have put it better than when he told MSNBC, “If the cloud is the Wild West, you’re going to need a bigger gun. And that’s what the APU is.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

* Battery life is an estimate calculated using the Windows Idle test and will vary by specific model.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

Today most of us run applications that use JavaScript and HTML5. We use applications that have high video content and tools that can be accelerated with GPUs. Off the shelf, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9, Office 11 and Movie Maker all use GPU acceleration – they come with it turned on. So does Adobe Flash.

Last week in Seattle we highlighted some 50 applications, some fancy, some everyday, which leverage the GPU to provide a superior experience.

What we need in this brave new world are planning and sizing tools that enable IT to capacity plan, and users to buy the right systems for their needs. And that means we need benchmarks that are relevant for those applications. Having spent some time as a Systems Engineer at IBM, I had the pleasure of working on lots of benchmarks and capacity planning tools, so I understand the importance of which workloads are chosen − and how they are weighted − in determining the relevance of a benchmark’s overall score.

And this brings me to the main point of today’s blog.

The Truth Will Set You Free

AMD has a long history of supporting open standards; if you have any doubt just look at our support for OpenCL. And this support extends to active involvement with open industry consortia that likewise promote open standards. The beauty of open standards is that they are just that – open.  Open to analysis, open to improvement and open to criticism.

AMD has for some time been a member of BAPCo, an industry organization that promotes, among other things, a benchmark known as SYSmark.  In the past year or so AMD, with openness and transparency, has tried to explain why we believe this benchmark is misleading with respect to today’s commonplace applications  − about a year ago I published a blog designed to explore this. If you work for a company that believes in transparency and integrity – and I do – then you have to take a stand and speak up when something is wrong. 

BAPCo’s response to this blog was a threat to expel AMD from the consortium.

The heart of our complaint is this: the SYSmark benchmark is not only comprised of unrepresentative workloads (workloads that ignore the importance of heterogeneous computing and, frankly, favor our competitor’s designs), but it actually generates misleading results that can lead to very poor purchasing decisions, causing governments worldwide to historically overspend somewhere in the area of approximately $8B!

Now you’re starting to see why this is relevant to you (presuming you’re a taxpayer).

Good Intentions, Bad Results

AMD decided to do what we believed was the right thing for the industry and our customers, so we continued to work within BAPCo to try to get the next-generation benchmark, SYSmark12 (“SM2012”), right. Our hope was to effect change so that it would be open, transparent and processor-neutral. We got workloads included that represent the things you and I actually do in a day (instead of 35,000 line spreadsheets!).

But the question remained: what weighting would BAPCo ultimately give to the real-world workloads − since it is this weighting that defines the actual benchmark scores.

Unfortunately, our good intentions were met with an outcome that we believe does a disservice to the industry and our customers. We weren’t able to effect positive change within BAPCo, and the resulting benchmark continues to distort workload performance and offers even less transparency to end users. Once again, BAPCo chose to ignore the opportunity to promote openness and transparency.

• While SM2012 is marketed as rating performance using 18 applications and 390 measurements, the reality is that only 7 applications and less than 10 percent of the total measurements dominate the overall score.  So a small class of operations across the entire benchmark influences the overall score.
• In fact, a relatively large proportion of the SM2012 score is based on system performance rated during optical character recognition (OCR) and file compression activities − things an average user will rarely if ever do.
• And SM2012 doesn’t represent the evolution of computer processing and how that evolution is influencing average users’ experience.  SM2012 focuses only on the serial processing performance of the CPU, and virtually ignores the parallel processing performance of the GPU.  In particular, SM2012 scores do not take into account GPU-accelerated applications that are widely used in today’s business environments.

There are more things that AMD objects to in SM2012, like the excessive wall clock time consumed by its installation and execution. But this explanation will hopefully help you understand why, ultimately, we couldn’t look in the other direction. 

Moving Forward…to Openness

So how can AMD stay in BAPCo? Simply put, we can’t. We have resigned from BAPCo and asked that our name and logo be removed from marketing materials promoting SM2012.

Now I hear some of you asking, “Isn’t this really just about the long-running antagonism between AMD and your competitor?”

No, it’s not. 

• It’s about fairness. Fairness to consumers and business users, to governments and other organizations that make purchasing decisions based on benchmarks, and, in the case of SYSmark, needlessly overspend because of it.
• It’s about relevance. Because do you want to buy a system based on an outdated approach to measuring performance? Don’t you want your system’s performance measured against relevant measures like HTML5 or GPU acceleration? And shouldn’t a benchmark that measures PC performance be relevant to other devices that are likely in your life (if you’re reading this blog I think it’s safe to presume you use an array of devices – I do). Benchmarks should measure the way people engage with their devices today – not stick to a formula more appropriate for the last millennium.
• And it’s about openness. Because you, and IT purchasing managers, should know what a benchmark represents and what the score really means to how the device will be used. That’s being set free.

And this is why we are exploring the options to encourage an alternative consortium, one that will deliver unbiased, representative benchmarks and promote more transparency for our industry. We are committed to working with likeminded companies that want to give consumers and business users an accurate, honest measure of what they can expect from their PCs and mobile devices. And what if ultimately we don’t “win” on these new benchmarks? Well, if the work is done with openness and transparency and results in a useful benchmark, we will make our case and let the market decide.

That’s all we have been asking for from BAPCo.

My hope is you, and the market, will vote for openness.

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

And so IT departments, with the best interests of their citizens, have managed for the past 40 years as benign dictatorships.

In a mainframe or mini-computer world this of course made sense. IT would be needed for access to the networks, databases and business systems. Today however many of those applications are delivered by HTML or other web based technologies, and many of us come to work with our own smartphones and tablets. If the applications and systems are available using web technologies, why can’t we access them from our phones and tablets?

And to make matters more complicated, those of us who travel don’t want to carry heavy PCs and bags of cables when a smartphone or tablet and light charger will do. Light weight and with good battery life, I find the interface with Microsoft Exchange is better on my iPad than on most commercial PCs.  In general, the visual experience we get from a modern smart-device or consumer PCs is far better than that of the old, heavy and ridged commercial PCs business users are accustomed to.

If you are lucky like me, you travel with something like a Lenovo E120 which is the best of both worlds. But for most mobile business users this isn’t an option – it’s not on the “approved” list maintained by their IT department. But I suspect that’s going to change.

IT managers better prepare themselves.  If they haven’t already experienced it, change is on the horizon. So, what’s changed?

For starters, the CEO brought in his or her tablet and said, “Please make this work for me” (which translates into, “Make this work for me.”).  Then the rest of the C-suite brought in their tablets and smartphones.  Then the VPs did the same thing, and then the directors.

You see where this is going.

Of course, companies can resist.  Just like so many companies resisted allowing access to the Web, or use of personal email, or blocked access to Facebook or IM.  Companies can just say, “No.”

But the challenge is that it’s not just the CEO who wants to use these new devices, it’s a growing number of existing business users – and especially those new to the workforce −  who want lighter form factors, better battery life, improved visual experiences. The employees companies want to retain, not to mention the ones they want to hire, are the same people who expect the same user experience at work – and on the road for work – that they expect at home, or in a coffee house.

Today, employees increasingly don’t expect to “clock in and clock out” from 8:30 till 5:30. But they do expect access to social networking sites (like Facebook), and to connect with their personal lives while “on the clock” at work. And they understand that they likely will connect with work when “off the clock” at home.

Of course, this is a huge challenge for today’s IT departments. How many platforms, and which ones, to support? Most of us are used to our Blackberry. The boss likes her iPad. Android looks like it’s going to be big?  And what’s next?

Welcome to the democratization of IT. Where will it end?

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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. 

And yet, since I first started to understand grid computing I have wondered whether, from a server point of view, there may be something to this notion. Swap the word “grid” for “cloud” or even “mega-data center” and think about how many big providers you can name. My list goes: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, BaiDu − and then a bunch of important but smaller names.

Yes it’s more than five, but nonetheless interesting how much of the world relies on so few providers.

These few mega-data centers are typically very secretive; I can’t even tell you if we provide them with our processors. So it’s interesting to me that a couple of weeks ago AMD participated in an event with Facebook, where we openly talked about how we have been working with them for many years. What is more surprising is that Facebook has put itself at the center of a new initiative called the Open Compute Project, making their partner relationships very public.

So much so, now their “secret sauce” – which was previously protected intellectual property − is on the web for anyone to take advantage of, if they choose. The goal of the project is to take the Facebook architecture and share it with the rest of the world as an open source project. This allows customers to download the specifications and even the CAD drawings so that they can either copy or innovate off of the Facebook designs. 

Now, don’t expect to see openly marketed “Facebook servers”; instead, I think we should view this as an exercise in sharing that will open up new areas of innovation − and that’s good for all of us.  

And that’s not the only openness in the world of server computing today.  Rackspace has put the cloud software stack out to the world through their OpenStack project. A longtime AMD Opteron™ processor supporter, Rackspace developed a set of open source technologies that deliver “a massively scalable cloud operating system.” AMD is working with Rackspace on OpenStack because we understand how powerful open source solutions can be in terms of advancing technology.

Another symbol of openness that AMD has been involved with for many years is the Open64 Project, which is a set of compiler tools that allow customers to build high-performance computing applications.  This week they announced their latest version, which include optimizations for AMD’s upcoming processors based on the “Bulldozer” core.

That’s the kind of openness that AMD is clearly in favor of, from down-in-the-stack compilers all the way up to massive scale-out data centers. In fact, we are one of the 15 largest contributors to open source in the world today.

You probably didn’t know that, but now you do – more evidence that we’re open to being open!

Nigel Dessau is Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer 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.