"AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced a distinguished line-up of keynote speakers as well as technical session topics for the inaugural AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS), which will be held June 13-16, 2011 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington.
 
Industry keynote presentations will be delivered by esteemed industry experts from AMD, ARM and Microsoft. In his keynote “Heterogeneous Parallelism at Microsoft” Herb Sutter, Microsoft principal architect of Native Languages, will showcase upcoming innovations to bring access to increasingly heterogeneous compute resources directly into the world’s most popular native languages.
 
Jem Davies, ARM fellow and vice president of Technology, Media Processing Division, will deliver a keynote about ARM’s long history of heterogeneous computing, its future strategy, and ARM’s support of standards, including OpenCL™."


Could AMD be developing ARM based products for tablets, netbooks, servers and smartphones? There will be a version of Windows 8 that is ARM compatible. AMD may be working on a version of Fusion that uses ARM instead of x86.

It would make sense for AMD to license the ARM architecture if they could compete with Nvidia’s Tegra and Qualcomm’s snapdragon processors.  AMD has a proven track record in creating graphics cards and so does NVidia. Will that give AMD an advantage from the start?  Can AMD produce a better product or a product that is used in different types of applications that Tegra or future Tegra products were not designed for?

 For several years now AMD has always been playing catch-up with Intel’s x86 processors and there in no end in sight. Will Bulldozer give AMD the performance catch-up needed to be faster the Intel? I doubt it or at least not when Sandy Bridge-EX comes out in Q4 of 2011.

We will have more information after the AMD Fusion Developer Summit.