Fun Quotes from the AFDS Media Roundtable

S|A @ AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit

Jun 16, 2011 by

There were a few interesting bacon-bits to come out of a rather dry media roundtable session, titled “Why Common Industry Standards Foster Innovation”, with representatives from AMD, ARM, and a certain Redmond, Washington-based company. The panel decided to address the so called “elephant in the room” or the AMD-ARM relationship, relatively early on in the session. Essentially the nature of the AMD-ARM relationship was described as a partnership to promote a shared vision of open industry standards. But when the ARM representative was pressed further as to his attendance at AFDS he responded, “I’m here because they [AMD] asked nicely.” Despite not quite directly saying it, it appears that relationship between the two companies does not involve the development of ARM based Fusion parts at this point.

Another fun quote from the ARM guy was his response to an AMD representative questioning his previous assertion that every single major semiconductor company uses ARM IP. “I can think of one major semiconductor company [Intel] that doesn’t use ARM.” quipped the AMD guy, “You’d be wrong.” retorted his counterpart from ARM. “Intel?” responded the AMD representative in a more direct fashion, “You’d be wrong.” continued the ARM guy. Those are some pretty strong words from ARM on the reach of their products.

The panel also addressed the predictions of death for discrete GPUs. With one AMD representative saying that, “The notion that APUs are going to wipe out discrete GPUs is insane.” It looks like that’s another case closed in the conspiracy theory book. It’s too bad that the low-end GPU market is dying out, but at least we’ll still get the high-end GPUs that scientists and gamers alike seem to crave.S|A

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Thomas Ryan

Author at SemiAccurate
Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.