14 DAY TRIAL // Scheduled to take place in mid June, AMD's Fusion Development Summit (AFDS) will host a presentation of the company's next-generation graphics processing units known as Southern Islands as well as a seminar about the future directions of accelerated processing units (APUs) and software development.
According to the AFDS schedule, that was posted on the summit website, the presentation will be entitled “AMD Graphics Core Next” and will be held by Mike Houston, an AMD Fellow working in architecture design and programming models for parallel architectures, and Mike Mantor, senior fellow at AMD leading the Compute Domain Architecture initiatives.
“In this presentation, an overview of AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture will be introduced. We’ll talk about the architecture of this new shader system, and how it provides improvements to the necessary software stack and creates user programming flexibility.
“We believe you will obtain an understanding of this new architecture and how it lays the foundation for future AMD architectures,” reads the presentation's description.
As everybody surely knows by now, AMD's upcoming graphics architecture is called Southern Islands and is a tweaked version of the current Radeon HD 6000-series GPU architecture manufactured using the 28nm fabrication process.
The new Radeon HD 7000 GPUs will also introduce a series of new features, but, apart from that, not so many details are available at this time.
In addition to this keynote, Xbit Labs reports that Phil Rogers, AMD corporate fellow and lead architect for AMD Fusion APU programmability, will hold a presentation called "The Programmer's Guide to the APU Galaxy" which will focus on GPU computing on the company's Brazos and Llano APUs.
The first AMD Southern Islands graphics cards are expected to become official in the third quarter of 2011 as reports suggest that the company has already taped out the first such GPUs in February, but, at this point, all depends on TSMC's 28nm yields.