Fusion

2nd-Generation AMD A-Series APU Landing Page

Phil Hughes — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:15:17 +0000

In case you didn’t hear, we just launched our 2^nd-Generation AMD A-Series APU, formerly codenamed “Trinity”. Jump over to the 2^nd-Generation AMD A-Series APU homepage to learn all about it, including deep-dive presentation, videos, images, partner quotes, social media streams and more!

Phil Hughes is a Senior PR Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Setting The Record Straight: Three Myths About PCs Explained

Guest Blogger — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:01:36 +0000

”Computers” have existed for a long time (according to Wikipedia, the term “personal computer” was first used in 1962!) and perceptions have been created to simplify the complexity of the inner workings of the PC so that the mainstream user can easily understand. However, there are three myths about PC’s that continue to exist today, which I will attempt to dispel in my post below. The first involves changing computer architectures, the second is around importance of the manufacturing process vs. user experience and the last addresses how application workloads utilize the technology that makes them run faster.

Myth No. 1: CPU is the brain of the computer.

Wrong. For a long time, when talking about PCs, people made the analogy that the CPU is the brain of the computer and the GPU is the eyes. The reason for this was obvious: CPUs do logical, numerical computation, while the GPU displayed images. As an analogy, the human brain is divided into two hemispheres – left and right. Popular opinion states that the left side is responsible for logical, numerical computation, while the right side is responsible for creativity, arts, emotions and visual attention. These two vastly different modes of thinking can both be considered as ‘processing’ the information, just that the data being processed is different.

Similarly, we can use this analogy when thinking about the various components of a PC, with the left hemisphere of the brain as the CPU and the right side as the GPU. However, for today’s applications, GPUs are absolutely as critical as CPUs. Not too many people need to run Excel spreadsheets faster, but many would like their photos to be more colorful, their HD movies smoother and their games more responsive. If the GPU you’re running cannot support this, then you might just be missing half of your brain, in a manner of speaking! You can read my full argument here: http://blogs.amd.com/home/2010/08/04/missing-half-your-brain/.

Myth No. 2: Manufacturing process is paramount.

Moore’s Law as applied to integrated circuits has accurately predicted that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. We are so accustomed to Moore’s Law that we are now equating new manufacturing technology with increased transistor density, which in turn, can lead to increases in performance or battery life. However, this is not necessarily true. Today, people care about the experience their device delivers and not just the manufacturing process. Just ask anyone who has ever used an iPad – what technology was the chip powering the iPad built on? If they don’t know, they shouldn’t feel bad about it. Most of us don’t give much thought to it.

Myth No. 3: Graphics (GPU) is only for gamers.

With the tremendous shift in people using their PCs for multimedia entertainment, application developers have started to change the way they code their programs in order to take advantage of the incredible compute power locked in the GPU. That has led to significant improvements in the responsiveness of leading web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Quickly managing photo editing via Adobe Photoshop CS6, video editing with Sony Vegas Pro 11, and reduced file compression times with WinZip 16.5, all of which are GPU accelerated applications, can vastly help improve the users’ experience.

Sometimes what we learned “back then,” isn’t always applicable to the here and now. Hopefully, my blog will help correct these misperceptions about GPUs and CPUs in the market and redefine them in their own unique ways as they shape a whole new generation of computing.

Leave me a comment below or share with your network of friends. Also, to find all our latest videos, photos, blogs and more for our AMD A-Series APU click here.

Sasa Marinkovic is the Sr. Manager, Industry Marketing Programs at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Accelerating The Scenarios Consumers Care About

Gabe Gravning — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:01:19 +0000

It’s no secret. These days, people expect a vivid and rich entertainment experience as well as smooth applications and great multi-tasking capabilities on their PC’s. Here at AMD we’re working hard to ensure our next-generation AMD A-Series APUs enable a fantastic user experience by working with our technology partners to help optimize the applications that consumers use every day.

We’ve been in close contact with our technology partners, not only with well known industry and technology leaders and brands, but also with exciting up-and-coming innovators and top minds and contributors to the open source community to enable new and enhanced performance and capabilities for end users. Some new products are launching today that have been specially tuned for our next-generation AMD A-Series APUs with exclusive features and enhanced performance:

Arcsoft is launching Arcsoft Link+, which can become the users’ complete home media command center, enabling each device to share, stream or download media to another device on their home network. With Arcsoft Link+, consumers can stream to and from one device to another supported device, and with a PC with our AMD A-Series APU on the home network, video enhancements such as Arcsoft’s SimHD upscaling and AMD Steady Video stabilization technologies as well as necessary file conversions and can occur in the background. See video demo.

Cyberlink is releasing updates to its flagship products: PowerDirector 10, PowerDVD 12, MediaShow 6, and MediaEspresso 6.5 with optimizations for the new second-generation AMD-A-series APUs, providing users with hardware-accelerated HD playback, enhanced video editing, maximum rendering and transcoding performance.

Fluendo is launching Moovida Universe, a 3D Media Center, providing users a new way to rediscover the content in their local media library. With its tailored 3D UI powered by a video game engine, Moovida Universe Interface is capable of displaying up to 13 concurrent videos that take full advantage of our next-gen AMD A-Series APUs power.

Here are just a few other examples of some recent support for accelerated user experiences that add to the already robust and growing list of optimized applications for AMD APUs, that include products such as recently launched Adobe Photoshop CS6:

Video playback: VLC media player, one of the top open-source based media players on the PC, will be including integrated support for AMD Steady Video technology 2.0, making it easy for users to turn on and off video stabilization from within the VLC user interface. Future work is continuing around OpenCL™ for de-noising, with an emphasis on “quality.” Here’s what VLC had to say about OpenCL acceleration on GPUs: “VideoLan is making it easier for consumers to enjoy smooth video playback with AMD Steady Video integrated into our VLC Media Player,” said Jean Baptise Kempf, president, VideoLAN. “Thanks to the versatility of OpenCL™, we can leverage the immense parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to help enhance everyday multimedia tasks and provide a rich video experience.”

Image processing: When it comes to editing photos, we’ve worked with the team over at GIMP to enhance the photo-editing experience, “AMD has been an outstanding colloborator, working with the open-source community to enable GIMP to leverage the GPU capabilities using OpenCL,” said Victor Oliveira, GIMP OpenCL developer. “With millions of downloads, our open-source image editing tool now has 19 high-depth filters accelerated on the AMD A-Series APUs, among others features, allowing users to do their image manipulation tasks in a faster and smoother way.”

Productivity: We’re not only accelerating video playback and photo imaging software through OpenCL, but also file compression and encryption. Corel’s WinZip 16.5 is able to leverage both CPU and GPU resources on our new second generation AMD A-Series APUs. Corel is just as excited as we are stating: “millions of business professionals and consumers count on WinZip to zip and deliver their files quickly,” remarked Patrick Nichols, President of WinZip. “The OpenCL accelerated file performance of WinZip 16.5 on AMD A-Series APUs lets our customers zip, share and secure even the largest file sets faster than ever.”

These are just a few of the more than 100 applications that leverage the immense graphics and parallel processing capabilities of the AMD A-Series APU;, the best entertainment and gaming experience. Check out more accelerated apps at www.amd.com/coolapps. Check out all our partners below for more:

Gabe Gravning is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Round II: AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt

Guest Blogger — Mon, 07 May 2012 05:01:49 +0000

With the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) just over a month away, hopefully you’re in the home stretch of finalizing your travel plans. But, we also hope you’re well on your way to collecting all 10 of the AFDS-inspired “Easter Eggs” that we’ve hidden around the web. Two weeks ago we issued the first five and we are now ready to lead you on your way to finding the remaining five. Remember, collect all 10 and be the first to submit screenshots to AFDSeastereggs@amd.com and you could win an amazing AMD-powered iBUYPOWER Gamer Extreme 579D3 Desktop PC complete with AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology. When you submit, please include your name, e-mail address, telephone number, and mailing address, and the subject of the e-mail must be “AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt Entry”. (Be careful of how you spell this or it might not get to us) This information will help us expedite getting the prize out to you if you’re the winner.

As a reminder, here are the sites you’ll need to check out to find all ten:

For round two, we’re focusing on the AMD Facebook tab, the AFDS site and right here on the blog. Without further ado, here are the five clues to finding the remaining five “easter eggs”:

Head over to the home page of the AMD Fusion blog. Keep your eye (and cursor) towards the header of the page. Clicking on a key word may remind you of “doing a barrel roll”. But, keep in mind, one click doesn’t always do the trick.
Read about why you’ll want to attend AFDS, making sure to go through each of the key reasons, taking you all the way to the bottom of the page. There you’ll find one of AMD’s greatest social media resources.
Check out the AFDS Facebook tab. Three times is the charm when you spot a key logo at the top of the page. Here, you’ll receive some additional clues that will help lead you to the remaining Easter Eggs.
Also on the AFDS Facebook tab, look to “sign up and stay informed” to find the next hidden treasure. Submitting nothing at all may be a surprisingly smart move.
In the same location as the previous clue, you’ll need to try something else to find the final egg. Where you are asked to provide your email address, you may want to enter your favorite open source programming language “For The Win”.

There you have it – combined with the first five clues, you should now have a clear map to help you find what you need in order to complete the AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt. Don’t worry, if you aren’t the first to find all ten, we will be giving away a Hewlett-Packard dv6 laptop with VISION Technology from AMD for second place, and an AMD Radeon^TM HD 7970 series GPU for third place.

Questions? If you’ve got ‘em, leave them in the comments or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Good luck!

Travis Williams is a Public Relations Representative at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A PURCHASE OF ANY KIND WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. Open to residents of the 50 US States (DC) and Canada (excl. Quebec), 18+. Contest begins April 23, 2012, and ends May 21, 2012. For complete contest rules and details, visit here.

Adobe and AMD Enable Brilliant Experiences

Clarice Simmons — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:00:15 +0000

Today marks an exciting moment with the announcement of AMD and Adobe’s collaboration on Adobe® Photoshop® and Premiere® Pro CS6. The collaboration between AMD and Adobe brings the first implementation of OpenCL™ heterogeneous compute within the Adobe Creative Suites family to optimize new and existing features in Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Premiere Pro CS6.

This is wonderful news for the millions of creative professionals using Adobe products. Adobe is launching Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6 which now includes OpenCL™ accelerated features in the Mercury Playback engine as well as Adobe® Photoshop® CS6 with breakthrough performance enabled by industry-standards with OpenCL and OpenGL acceleration in the new Mercury Graphics Engine. Benefit users can look forward to include an ever-growing array of hardware accelerated functions able to offer amazing performance and productivity.

There are a fantastic number of GPU accelerated features in the new Adobe Photoshop CS6. Here are two great examples of the incredible levels of performance that have resulted from the collaboration with Adobe to optimize for Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), AMD Radeon™ Graphics, and AMD FirePro™ Professional Graphics through the industry standard OpenCL and OpenGL API’s:

New Blur Gallery

Working directly in the Photoshop CS6 interface, users can create tilt-shift effects, keeping one point in focus and then slanting and widening/narrowing the amount of blur emanating from that point. Alternatively, the whole image can be blurred except for one focal point, or the user can drop multiple focal points anywhere in the image and then dial up the amount of blurriness each creates.

Before and After “Iris Blur” Effect. Images courtesy of Gary Wilson Photography (garywilsonphoto.com)

Imagine the amount of processing horsepower it takes to apply, say, six blur focal points on a 24-megapixel image. It could bring a non-accelerated system to its knees. However, with the Mercury Graphics Engine and OpenCL driving the feature, the editing process becomes a breeze, with the ability to render in only a few seconds. In fact, a mainstream notebook PC based on the AMD A8-3530MX APU is up to 672% faster when accelerated by the horsepower of the AMD Radeon™ graphics technology in the APU.* Notebooks with AMD A-series APUs are widely available from OEMs around the world in notebooks with VISION Technology from AMD.

Lightning Fast Liquify

The Liquify Effect has been an essential part of Photoshop for the better part of a decade, but as the tool continues to evolve and average image sizes keep expanding, the processing resources needed to support the filter have become significant. Again, most systems can perform Liquify operations, but demanding file sizes, especially on lower-end hardware platforms, may make loading and processing times inordinately long. That’s where hardware-based OpenGL acceleration comes in. Now with Liquify, you can immediately open unbelievably large images and immediately start working with more flexibility and options than ever. Quite frankly this wasn’t possible without hardware acceleration. Again, taking the example of a mainstream notebook PC based on the AMD A8-3530MX, we are seeing up to 456% faster Liquify when accelerated by AMD Radeon™ graphics technology in the APU.*

Before and After “Liquify” Effect. Images courtesy of Gary Wilson Photography (garywilsonphoto.com)

Creative Suite 6 is another great example of the work AMD and Adobe are doing to enable brilliant experiences. Find out more about the AMD-Adobe collaborations at www.amd.com/adobe .

And be sure to register for the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) June 11 – 14 in Bellevue, Where Adobe’s senior vice president and Chief Software Architect, Tom Malloy will give a keynote and Adobe will lead a handful breakout sessions on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Flash. Register now at www.amd.com/afds.

Clarice Simmons is a Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

* Testing was performed by AMD using test scripts and a 60.2 MB .psd format source file of a 5616×3744 resolution image provided by Adobe. Time to complete a RGB 300 Blur scripted render test was 51.06 seconds with GPU OpenCL acceleration on versus 394.26 seconds with GPU OpenCL acceleration off. Time to complete scripted Liquify render test was 15.57 seconds with GPU acceleration on versus 86.62 seconds with GPU acceleration off. Test system was a notebook with AMD A8-3530MX APU with AMD Radeon™ HD 6620G Graphics, 1.9GHz, 4G 1600 DDR3 Memory, Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit. SBNB-I99

AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt – What You Need to Know

Guest Blogger — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 05:01:05 +0000

By Travis Williams, Public Relations Representative at AMD

Are you gearing up for the AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2012 (AFDS)? We certainly are. But preparing for the heterogeneous computing event of the year doesn’t have to be all serious business. We wanted to have some fun in the run up to AFDS, and reward some of our most clever AMD fans in the process. With that in mind, we invite you to participate in the AFDS Virtual Scavenger hunt, where you’ll need to keep your eyes peeled for some hidden tricks we’ve sprinkled around various websites. Be the first to find all 10 “Easter Eggs” and you could win an AMD-powered iBUYPOWER Gamer Extreme 579D3 Desktop PC complete with AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology. Not too shabby, huh? We also have some great runner-up prizes including a Hewlett-Packard dv6 laptop with VISION Technology from AMD for second place and an AMD HD Radeon^TM7970 series GPU for third place.

Sites involved: The Easter Eggs are hidden across the following sites:

Not sure what kind of “Easter Eggs” we’re talking about? No problem. We’ll give you one for free. See the Facebook and Twitter buttons to the right? Go ahead and grab the Facebook icon (click and hold), drag it onto the Twitter icon, and let go.

Pretty cool, huh? Now you’ve got one. Nine more to go.

Now the task is to find the rest and take a screenshot of each “Easter Egg.” When you have 10 screenshots (one for each Egg you think you’ve found), you should submit all of the screenshots to this email address we created: AFDSeastereggs@amd.com. You should also include your name, e-mail address, telephone number, and mailing address, and the subject of the e-mail should be “AFDS Virtual Scavenger Hunt Entry”

We are going to be hiding the “Easter Eggs” in two waves. There are currently five of them in the wild right now (you’ve got one already). Here is some more help to lead you on your way:

The First Five:

See above about Facebook & Twitter button freebie. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
The AFDS home page is a good place to start. Get the super saver discount on registration and have AMD pick up $200 on your (hidden) tab, and you’ll be able to soak up all the OpenCL news (hint) you could ever want.
Look for a trademark on OpenCL Zone at Developer Central. Clicking on it may take you in the right direction.
SemiAccurate does a nice job highlighting two new keynote speakers at AFDS ’12.
Head over to the AFDS Facebook tab and focus on the live Twitter stream. Similar to SemiAccurate, we’ve highlighted a key message. Don’t overthink it. The most important information is always at the top.

In two weeks from today we’ll set the next five ”Easter Eggs” loose, and will leave more clues right here on the AMD Fusion blog. We’ll also provide regular updates to help you out on Facebook at www.facebook.com/amd and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/amd_unprocessed. Bookmark all of these sites and check back often. Be sure to hold off sending in your entries until we have released all the Easter Eggs.

And of course it wouldn’t be a contest without some guidelines. See below for the fine print, including official rules and details.

Well… what are you waiting for? It’s a race – go!

Travis Williams is a Public Relations Representative at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

AMD “Trinity” and “Brazos 2.0” Heading Your Way!

Phil Hughes — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:30:12 +0000

Great news AMD fans, our second-generation AMD A-Series APU (codenamed: “Trinity”) began shipping last quarter – putting the best video and gaming experiences and superior battery life one step closer to your fingertips!

The 2012 AMD A-Series APU helps improve on virtually every aspect of our current A-Series APUs while doubling the performance-per-watt over our previous generation. It enables Brilliant HD, amazing productivity and accelerated applications across a spectrum of form factors – including ultrathin and mainstream notebooks, embedded devices and desktops.

Not to be outdone, our new essential notebook platform codenamed “Brazos 2.0” also began shipping to OEMs last quarter! It builds on the success of our highly successful 2011 Low Power Platform, bringing many new features, excellent performance and extended battery life to entry-level products.

Stay tuned: “Trinity” and “Brazos 2.0” systems will be available globally soon!

Adobe and AMD Bring OpenCL Powered Real-Time Editing and Effects to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6

Guest Blogger — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:20:17 +0000

If you’re a video editing geek like me, then it doesn’t get any better than the upcoming release of of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Sure, there’s the expected updates and improvements that we’re all looking forward to – like the great new sleek, highly intuitive and customizable user interface with a redesigned monitor panel, customized button bars and a new audio track design, improved meters and revamped mixer panel – but what really gets my heart racing is the newly enhanced Adobe Mercury Playback Engine that incorporates OpenCL™ heterogeneous compute for the very first time on a number of Apple® MacBook Pro laptops with AMD Radeon™ graphics.

If you’re unfamiliar with OpenCL™, it’s the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Meaning, it greatly improves speed and responsiveness by taking advantage of untapped resources (i.e. the GPU) for parallel compute across a number of applications from gaming and medical software, and now with specific functions like processing effects and transitions when video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

AMD and Adobe have been hard at work collaborating on integrating OpenCL into Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. In fact, I ran into Adobe’s Director of Video Product Management, Bill Roberts at the Adobe booth (#SL2624) here at NAB, where they are showcasing the OpenCL powered real-time editing and effects, and he reiterated their enthusiasm for bringing open standards to life through Adobe Premiere Pro:

“AMD has been a vital partner in helping us bring GPU-acceleration through OpenCL™ to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on current generation MacBooks everywhere. I think our customers will find the enhanced Mercury Playback Engine to be a dramatic improvement and a great benefit to users who will experience an immediate dramatic performance increase with this new release software release . We couldn’t be more excited about the results of our work with AMD on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. We’re definitely looking forward to continuing our work with AMD on future enhancements to Adobe Premiere Pro.” – Bill Roberts, Director of Video Product Management, Adobe

So, Adobe is excited. AMD is excited. But what about you, are you excited that Adobe Premiere Pro works dramatically faster with sweeping performance and stability enhancements to the natively 64 bit, muti-core-CPU optimized and GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine (comments are ALWAYS welcome below if you’d like to answer my rhetorical question)?

If GPU acceleration, OpenCL optimization and multi-core processing aren’t exactly the kind of thing that makes your hair stand up, let’s try this: with OpenCL powered GPU-acceleration on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, effects like color correction, image control, perspective, dissolve and more than three dozen other OpenCL™ optimized effects bring real-time editing and effects to life so that you never have to break your creative flow. And if that wasn’t enough, it also accelerates the export from your source format to your preferred destination format by up to 241%* for quick and easy distribution and publishing.

If you couldn’t make it to the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas this year, I strongly suggest that you join AMD and Adobe at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) June 11 – 14 in Bellevue, WA. Adobe’s senior vice president and Chief Software Architect, Tom Malloy will provide a keynote, and the Adobe Premiere Pro team will lead a breakout session on OpenCL and Adobe Premiere Pro. You can register and check out more details at www.amd.com/afds. I hope to see you there.

That’s what I’m pumped about. What about you? What new features and design capabilities are you excited about? Dynamic timeline trimming? Warp stabilizer effect? Expanded multi-cam editing? Uninterrupted playback? Rolling shutter repair effect? Or one of 20+ other new capabilities I didn’t mention? Those aren’t rhetorical, so feel free to answer below.

Andrew Baum is a Senior Developer Relations Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

*Testing was performed by AMD using a test project provided by Adobe in DVCPro format, 31 seconds, 1280×1080, 29.97fps with export to H.264 format, max render quality. With OpenCL (GPU acceleration) enabled, the export took 1:04.2 seconds. With CPU only, the export took 3:39.3 seconds. Test system was a MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8 GB 133 MHz DDR RAM, AMD Radeon™HD 6750M graphics with 1024MB of video RAM, and Mac OS Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b)

Adobe Showcases Top Quality Flash Gaming with AMD at GDC 2012

Clarice Simmons — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:05:15 +0000

Great news, the Adobe’s Flash Player 11.2 release I highlighted in my recent blog post is now available for download at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Earlier this month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we had the opportunity to spend some quality time with Renault Erickson, Platform Evangelist for Adobe, at the Adobe booth to discuss and see the current state of high-quality Flash-based gaming (watch the video). In fact, Renault was more than happy to show us Rovio’s Angry Birds and Trendy Entertainment’s Dungeon Defenders both powered by Flash Stage 3D on a VISION notebook with an AMD A8 APU.

We also had the opportunity to speak with Thibault Imbert, Flash Player Product Manager for Adobe, and learn more about how Adobe Flash Player enables accelerated experiences through Stage 3D on AMD APU and GPUs (watch the video). Thibault explains how third party Flash Stage 3D frameworks, like Away3D and Alternativa3D for 3D and Starling for 2D, are designed to provide game developers with a way to access GPU acceleration through Actionscript for both 2D and 3D games. Thibault also provided a candid glimpse on where Flash is going in the future.

If you are a developer, or just someone who wants to hear about the latest innovations that will help shape future technology, we invite you to join us at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) in Bellevue, Washington June 11-14, 2012 where Tom Malloy, Senior Vice President and Chief Software Architect at Adobe will be among several great keynote speakers. Adobe will also be driving a handful of fantastic breakout sessions, including one by Thibault, who will be discussing some of the great advances being made by the Flash team in gaming and premium video. We hope to see you there!

P.S. – if you register for AFDS by 11:59PM PDT April 8^th, you can save $300 off the regular price.

Clarice Simmons is Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

Accelerate your performance with AMD FirePro™ Professional Graphics and Sony Vegas Pro 11

Guest Blogger — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:00:45 +0000

Back in December, I blogged about the great performance we were seeing with Sony Vegas Pro 11 when we tested AMD FX 8150 eight-core processors with our most powerful consumer grade graphics product at the time, AMD Radeon™ HD 6990 − popular amongst technology enthusiasts and the most demanding gamers. But for the Vegas Pro11 power user who needs professional grade graphics capable of keeping pace with their creativity, internal thought processes and an ever changing vision for the project at hand, and AMD FirePro™ professional graphics is just the ticket.

Vegas Pro 11 is designed to take advantage of GPU acceleration for video FX, transitions, compositing, pan/crop, track motion and encoding, resulting in significantly faster workflows that keep pace with the speed of thought. Technology should never interfere with the creative process or slow you down; it should just work behind the scenes to enable the best user experience possible. Our resident Media & Entertainment expert and longtime Vegas Pro user Charlie Boswell , who will speak at Sony’s user group event at NAB again this year, wholeheartedly agrees and shares his thoughts in his latest blog post on AMD’s collaboration with Sony Creative.

Vegas Pro11 runs great on AMD FirePro™ graphics but let me lift the hood a little to show you how these technologies work in concert behind the scenes to enable a great user experience. We decided to take a look at Vegas Pro11 running on a single AMD FX 8150 CPU, and then how it performs as GPU acceleration is enabled using three different AMD FirePro professional graphics cards as well as the comparable competing NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards.

To conduct this benchmark testing, we used a benchmark provide by Sony featuring a Vegas Pro project consisting of seven segments in the timeline of varying complexity and length. The sequence was then played using “Best/Full” preview settings and the average “free run” frame rate recorded . We also recorded the times required to “final render” the project. We measured “software-only” performance in Sony Vegas 11 first by using only the AMD FX 8150 CPU by itself to process the timeline. We then enabled GPU acceleration mode and performed the same test using six different graphics cards: AMD FirePro™ V4900, V5900 and V7900 and comparably priced NVIDIA Quadro™ 600, 2000, and 4000. The following is the average playback performance, as well as the rendering times for the entire sequence*:

The test systems consisted of an AMD FX 8150 8-core processor, 3.6 GHz, 8GB RAM, Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit with AMD FirePro unified driver 8.911.3.1000 - 01/16/2012 and NVIDIA driver 295.73 - 02/09/2012.

Not all professional graphics solutions are created equally… and this is a good example. AMD FirePro professional graphics offer a real bang for the buck when it comes to cost/performance – if you really want to take advantage of the fastest performance levels for workstation-class graphics at a given price point, AMD FirePro is the way to go.

You can clearly see the positive impact on fame rates when GPU acceleration is enabled. Higher rates translate directly to a more capable, more responsive experience when working with the editing and FX toolsets in the Sony Vegas Pro timeline, as well as faster final rendering. And we’re pleased to report that all three AMD FirePro graphics cards performed faster with significantly higher frame rates than competing cards, clearly demonstrating the productivity potential of combining CPUs and AMD FirePro GPUs via OpenCL™ for improved application performance. When every second counts, image how much time could be saved and how much more you could accomplish when technologies work together to accelerate creativity and remove technical bottlenecks.

These numbers are pretty impressive, and to top it off, these graphics cards are up for any challenge a Vegas Pro11 user takes on. Built to last, AMD FirePro V4900, V5900 and V7900 professional graphics are rigorously tested by leading software vendors and computer manufacturers, and are backed by a longer term warranty and feature a longer life cycle than is typical with consumer grade graphics.

If you’d like to see these cards in action and you’re headed to NAB in Las Vegas this April, be sure to stop by the Sony Creative exhibit #C11001 and see Sony products running on AMD FirePro graphics. And if you are interested in upgrading your current system to experience the benefits of GPU acceleration sooner than later, just send an email to tessa.wolff@amd.com and find out if you qualify for 15% off select AMD FirePro products.

* Tests conducted at AMD using Sony Vegas Pro 11 in test mode with highest possible performance settings selected measuring 1) timeline responsiveness given by the maximum FPS during preview playback of a sample project with effects and transitions; and 2) rendering speed for a 126 second sample movie. AMD FirePro V4900 showed a max of 32.9 FPS during preview playback and 115 seconds to render the movie; 35.7 FPS and 108 seconds for V5900; 53.6 FPS and 80 seconds for V7900. NVIDIA Quadro 600 showed a max of 13 FPS during preview playback and 290 seconds to render the movie; 23.1 FPS and 162 seconds for Quadro 2000, and 31.7 FPS and 118 seconds for Quadro 4000. The test systems consisted of an AMD FX 8150 8-core processor, 3.6 GHz, 8GB RAM, Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit with AMD FirePro unified driver 8.911.3.1000 – 01/16/2012 and NVIDIA driver 295.73 – 02/09/2012.