Techcon is 10! Yes, for the tenth time ARM Techcon is up and running from 1 to 3 October at the Santa Clara convention center. Ahead of three days of presentations, demonstrations, tutorials, keynotes, exhibitions and panels from the great and the good in the embedded community, Peter Hutton, Executive VP & President Products Group kicked it all off demonstrating how widely supported ARMv8 is – from entry level phones through to servers. Joining him on stage was Dr. Tom Bradicich from HP announcing two enterprise class ARMv8 servers. And joining him was one his first customers, Dr. Jim Ang from Sandia Labs. If this went on there was going to be no room left on the stage.
For Mali-philes, graphics, display and video are of course on show here in force. There’ll be some great, enigmatically named talks … Tom Cooksey’s “Do Androids Have Nightmares of Botched System Integrations?” will showcase the critical parts of the Android media subsystem and how three key Mali products – Graphics, Display and Video can come together to become something greater than the sum of the parts. Brad Grantham speaking on “Optimizing Graphics Development with Parameterized Batching” and Tom Olson's tackling “Bandwidth-efficient rendering using pixel local storage”.Anton Lokhmotov’s GPU Compute optimisation guide “Love your Code? Optimize it the Right Way” will attempt the impossible by mixing live demonstrations from a Chromebook with absolutely no PowerPoint slides at all.
Mali is also in much evidence on the show floor, all part of the buzzing ARM Techcon Expo. Live demonstrations are showcasing ASTC texture encoding, transaction elimination with Mali-T600 and some of the power saving properties of Ittiam Systems's HEVC decoder running on an energy efficient combination of CPU and Mali GPU.
As well as Anton’s talk there is plenty to keep GPU Compute fans happy. Roberto Mijat and I presented a talk this morning about how ARM is working with developers to optimise applications using GPU Compute on Mali. And Roberto is back with a panel discussion in the Expo, “Meet the Revolutionaries who are Making GPU Compute a Reality!”, with representatives from Ittiam, Khronos and ArcSoft discussing developments in this growing field.
Do watch this space... there'll be more detail and blogs about the talks soon. And if you’re in the area, do come by and check it out!