Jem Davies, the vice president of technology at processor designer ARM, will deliver a keynote at Advanced Micro Devices' Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS). The keynote will likely be dedicated to OpenCL, but it is noteworthy that the x86 company decided to invite the designer of competing ARM architecture to its summit.

Mr. Jem will deliver a keynote about ARM’s history of heterogeneous computing, its future strategy, and ARM’s support of standards, including OpenCL. Jem Davies is an ARM fellow and VP of technology for the media processing division at ARM, who is responsible for setting the technology roadmaps for ARM's media processing division including for graphics and video processor technologies. He is also responsible for advanced product development, technological investigations of acquisitions and member of ARM's CPU architecture review board (ARB) and is currently spearheading ARM’s heterogeneous computing strategy.

AMD Fusion is the company's master heterogeneous computing strategy under which the company develops its accelerated processing units (APUs) and creates tools and standards that can take advantage of both x86 and massively-parallel Radeon cores.

AMD claims that ultimately graphics processing technologies should be similar and compatible on x86 and ARM platforms.

“What’s often lost in the awkwardly-framed debate between x86 and the ARM platform is the importance of the GPU on either. To have software developers talk about how OpenCL works for them parlays into AMD’s advantage with Llano, which offers 400 to 500GFLOPS of compute power in a device that’s very thin, compared to 100GFLOPS of compute on a regular Intel or AMD CPU. [...] Mobile is still a growing market opportunity for AMD. We offer a differentiated design that’s very attractive to a software developer," said John Taylor, director of AMD’s client product and software marketing division, in an interview with CRN.

Tags: AMD, Fusion, Cortex, Mali