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The following article is part two of an article about the AMD Tech Day I attended on June 25th, 2008. Part one can be found here.

Looking at Discrete Graphics
After a lunch at the AMD cafeteria (paid for by AMD), the afternoon session kicked off with Ognjen Brkic, Product Market Manager – Graphic Products Group (Mobile), taking us through the realm of discrete graphics. Earlier this year, AMD did a survey where they asked people what the number one thing was they wished they could transfer from their desktop PCs to their notebooks, and the leading request was the graphics power of their desktop. Graphics on notebooks have traditionally been underpowered, and it's only fairly recently that we've started seeing GPUs on laptops that have enough power to play modern games and decode HD video without burdening the CPU.

The problem is that in order to deliver great graphics performance on a laptop, you typically need a discrete graphics chip – and that adds to the cost, power consumption, and often even the size of the laptop. So how can a user have a thin and light notebook without serious graphics firepower, yet still access a powerful GPU when they want to play games? ATI came up with XGP as a solution to this problem. Read more...

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! Read more...