AMD’s Joe Macri challenges DesignCon attendees to embrace the future

DesignCon 2012 keynoter AMD’s Joe Macri will deliver a challenge to the design community to embrace the enormous opportunities soon to be handed to them in the form of an advanced architecture. In the keynote, the corporate vice president and CTO of the Client Division at AMD, invites the audience into what he calls the first day of the future, where they will build machines that in the recent past would have been cost prohibitive or impossible .

"Delivering solutions to long-standing challenges of integration in ever-shrinking devices, the architecture will enable form factors that interact with users in ways designers never dreamed possible.  Software programmers, or “artists” will be able to take full advantage of the tools and infrastructure and hardware engineers will have the power-efficient and extremely formidable compute device to radically change today’s form factors," said Macri.

Macri, offers a bird’s eye view of the disruptive architecture that joins CPU and GPU process cores into a unified processing engine. The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) tightly couples the cores into a single unit, yielding both higher application performance, and lower power consumption than previously deliverable in products ranging from cell phones to supercomputers.

“We need to solve major design problems in a very power-efficient way.   At the end of the day, it’s really about power, size, how a design fits into its environment, and the end-user’s experiences in the form factors they want. In some cases HSA will accelerate advances by an order of magnitude,” said Macri.

“HSA is the basis of AMD’s architecture plans going forward. We will be building an array of products around it and asking customers to build an array of products around each of those. This represents the backbone of AMD’s future. It encompasses both hardware and software and it will affect every designer,” said Macri.

Macri will deliver his keynote on Monday, January 30, 12:00pm - 12:30pm. To register, Click here.

Joe Macri is a Corporate Vice President and CTO of the Client Division at AMD. He is a 25-year veteran of the computer industry and has held various positions at Digital Equipment Corp, ATI and AMD. He is also Chairman of Jedec JC42.3 Dram Committee and Vice Chair at Large of Jedec Board of Directors. His areas of expertise are in CPU, Memory and Graphics design with over 20 patents pending or granted.