Digital Home Thoughts: AMD Tech Day: Morning Sessions

This is one of the quickest trips I've made for a technology event, but when given the invitation I was keen to go – I hadn't really heard, first hand, what AMD had been working on since January of 2007. With the recent announcement of their Puma platform, I was eager to learn more about what they brought to the table with their new technologies. Full disclosure: my flight and hotel were paid for by AMD (and so was a big ol' Texas BBQ dinner detailed later). Equally full disclosure: having so many tech-heavy sessions in one day was like drinking from a fire hose (to quote one attendee), so while I've tried to be as accurate as possible in this article, it's possible I may have gotten some of the details incorrect. Without further ado, let's jump in!

AMD Tech Day
I flew from Calgary to Houston, then Houston to Austin, getting to the hotel (a classy place called The Mansion at Judges Hill) around 10 PM. The next morning, bright and early, all 13 attendees got on a bus and we headed to AMD's headquarters.


Figure 1: AMD's new headquarters in Austin are brand-spanking new...when we were visiting they were still doing some internal construction and painting. The grounds and building designs are beautiful.


Figure 2: All aboard the good ship AMD!


Figure 3: Look mom, I'm a VIP! I had to give the badge back at the end of the day, although some people just smiled and walked through the exit door and kept their badges. Tsk tsk. ;-)


Figure 4: AMD's Chis Cloran kicked off the day.

The opening remarks by Chris Cloran, Corporate VP of Product Marketing, focused on the recent Puma platform launch – he emphasized that the success of the Puma launch was largely due to AMD and ATI working together effectively to create a platform that leveraged the strengths of both groups. There are 110 "design wins" coming to market from various partners – and a design win is defined as a platform, which is another way of saying a particular model of laptop. Each model of laptop will typically have an average of four versions, so in the coming months we should be seeing somewhere around 400 Puma-based laptops being released by AMD's partners. Impressive!

Pat Moorhead, VP of Advance Marketing, took the floor next and gave us a bit about his background – he loves consumer technologies, and he talked about the terabytes of storage he has in his home, the UMPCs that he uses, and basically what a complete geek he was – which made him instantly understood by all the attendees in the room.