AMD TFE 2011 report by VR-Zone.com
Yesterday we attended AMD's Technical Forum and Exhibition, or TFE as it's simply called and this was the 7th time AMD held the event in Taipei. Although AMD didn't' talk too much about its future products, there were a couple of glimpses of new technology and there was also an NDA press briefing for the upcoming FX-processors from AMD, but sadly we can't tell you about it, yet.
At last year's TFE AMD had invited media from all over the world for a press briefing on its then upcoming 6000-series of GPUs, but this year it was a fairly low key event for the media with only select media from a few Asian countries being on location. That said, the event isn't intended for the media, but rather for AMD's partners and we saw representatives for both notebook, motherboard and graphics card manufacturers at the show. The afternoon consisted of various presentations from both AMD and some of its components partners relating to how to make better components or systems based on AMD technology.
What the company did talk about was a little bit about the future of its CPUs, although as you can see, the roadmaps are hardly what you'd call detailed. AMD mentioned its Piledriver core which should arrive next year, first in Trinity which replaces Llano and later on in its next generation desktop CPU. We should point out that AMD is not planning any future mobile CPUs, only APUs, although this is hardly surprising. AMD is expecting about 10 percent performance boost overall from the Piledriver core, although this is seemingly just an estimation as this point in time.
AMD was also keen to point out that its working hard to promote open standards, specifically OpenCL in this case as the company believes it offers the best cross-platform compatibility, scalability and of course the ability to take advantage of the GPU for computational tasks. To that extent AMD has launched a couple of OpenCL programing handbooks on top of going around and promoting OpenCL to its partners. AMD was mentioning a few products in its presentation such as Adobe Flash Player 11, Microsoft Silverlight 5, various DVD/Blu-ray playback applications and some video editing applications of which the most well-known one is Sony Vegas Pro.
AMD also talked about graphics and showed off one of its 28nm mobile Radeon HD 7000 chips and they also had a live demo of it playing Dragon Age 2, although there was no mention of which specific model it was, or the specifications of the test system but the game played and looked as you'd expect it to. Apologies for the lack of a close-up of the chip, but it wasn't shown for very long. AMD did also show a block diagram of the compute unit of the 7000-series GPUs, which we did snap a shot of. AMD recons it'll be first with 28nm GPU's, but as Nividia has as yet to announce anything with regards to its 28nm, we'll just have to wait and see who'll be first.
AMD was also keen to point out that its PowerTune technology allows its graphics card to automagically overclock while staying within the power and thermal envelope the cards have been designed for, although if an application or benchmark is run on the GPU that draws a lot of power and as such creates additional head, the GPU will throttle back to prevent its cards from failing.
Last but not least we also have a couple of videos from the event, the first one shows AMD's new five screen wide Eyefinity setup which is apparently able to display 10 million pixels if you have the right resolution displays. The second video shows MSI's AMD powered tablet running the Windows 8 preview code and AMD is of course talking about the benefits of Fusion here and how the GPU can help make for a smoother experience.
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AMD TFE 2011
That's all for now, but we will have some more details about the upcoming FX-processors next week, so check back with us then for some thoughts from AMD about its new platform.
AMD TFE 2011 report
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