After two years of holding the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) in the first half of June, AMD decided to move the next installment of their developer conference to the second half of the year. Instead of following up Computex, which traditionally is held at the very beginning of June, AFDS 2013 will be held from November 11-14. This was publicized last week by Bob Whitecotton, Senior Manager of Developer Outreach at AMD, announcing the call for papers.
Not only did AMD change the date of their developer conference that focuses more on the technical aspects of their current and future products, but also the location. While the first two summits were held in Bellevue (WA), this year the conference moves to San Jose (CA), specifically to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. This is a familiar path to Nvidia GPU Technology Conference, which will be held at the same convention center at the beginning of the year. The 2013 GTC will be held March 18-21.
Companies and interested developers can file proposals for the conference until March 15th. AMD will review submissions and notify selected candidates by April 26th. More details on the process can be found on the linked blog post.
Possible reasons for the move
At this point we don’t know as to why AMD moved both the date and the location of their conference. Sure the location is way closer to their headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. As far as the date goes, it might be realigned with the impending launch of a new generation of products. For the most part of 2013 AMD is said to stick with their current lineup, with the notable exception of the Kabini APU based on the Jaguar architecture succeeding Ontario/Zacate based on the Bobcat architecture for small form factor systems. AMDs Trinity APUs get a slightly updated successor called Richland which won several design wins at CES 2013, but unlike Kabini – this is only a tuned version of a previous product. AMD FX lineup (currently represented by Vishera) are not going to get an update in 2013 either.
But at the very end of 2013 the first chip featuring the next iteration of their high-performance CPU architectures dubbed Steamroller is said to debut in the Kaveri APUs which follow up Richland. On AFDS 2013 we might be able to see this chip for the first time. Another interesting product that could be ready by next AFDS is an interesting new product from the SeaMicro division, based on small x86 cores, that was hinted at in an interview to us at the end of last year.
