AMD Developer Outreach had a big, shiny presence at the recent Microsoft® TechEd Developers 2007 event, which took place in Barcelona, Spain during the week of November 5th (see photo montage, below). We enjoyed meeting all of the delegates who stopped by our booth and/or who attended our two breakout sessions. Many of the delegates we met hailed from the farthest reaches of the EMEA region. By the end of our week in Spain’s capitol of cool, we had come to admire its people, its culture and especially its cuisine!
One of AMD’s primary goals for sponsoring TechEd Developers 2007, which drew close to 4,000 delegates, was to educate managed code developers about the various tools, libraries and optimizations that AMD makes freely available through AMD Developer Central (developer.amd.com). We also sought to communicate the steps that managed code developers can take to optimize their code for multi-core processor platforms. In other words, this stuff ain’t just for native-code junkies.
AMD’s Mike Wall gave a breakout session on the topic of, “Multi Core is Here! But How Do You Resolve Data Bottlenecks in Native Code?” This well-attended session provided delegates with techniques for multi-threaded code and data-parallel optimizations as demonstrated in C/C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
In addition, AMD’s Robin Maffeo gave a breakout session on, “Empowering Developers: x86 and x64 Performance Considerations when Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.” Robin’s session also drew a sizable crowd, and Robin detailed many of the multi-threading and CLR enhancements made to the Microsoft .NET Framework in collaboration with AMD. Robin further described several compiler and linker switches and options that can help developers quickly achieve highly optimized and multi-core aware code.
AMD’s display booth, located front and center within the CCIB exhibition hall, also offered a number of hands-on demos, as well as an XBox 360 lounge for Halo 3 enthusiasts. AMD’s Brent Hollingsworth extolled the virtues of the AMD Performance Library, a series of low-level math routines and higher-level functions to help optimize signal and image processing. AMD’s John McCrae provided real-time demos of Visual Studio 2008 performance comparisons with Visual Studio 2005, particularly focusing on using the right compiler options at the right time. Mike Wall demonstrated how developers can use AMD CodeAnalyst™ to identify bottlenecks and hot spots in managed code applications within Visual Studio 2008. Finally, Robin Maffeo demonstrated key techniques on how to get the most of managed code for both client and server applications.
We really enjoyed our time in Barcelona and we’d love to hear your feedback about how AMD Developer Outreach can make future events even more useful and relevant to our growing developer community!
AMD’s Mike Wall demonstrates AMD CodeAnalyst™ performance analyzer.
AMD’s Robin Maffeo demonstrates Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 compiler optimizations to delegates.
Conference delegates take a break at AMD’s Xbox 360 lounge.
Edit: Updated image paths to correct broken images.
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