APUs in the news

Referencing this article. When we talked to a few VC’s previously about APUs, we were asked to show that there would be demand. Kind of hard to do so in advance of the market, but we made rough estimates. Earlier this year, ClearSpeed took its reference design board and started selling it. Sure enough people bought it. Because it does a number of things quite well. At a lower power consumption.

The trick, as we told the VCs and others, is getting the applications on there. That is the hard part. And that is the part you need to make easy. With a standard board design and basic API. Write your code so that it is not tied to the board, but tied to the API, and have the API interface properly to the board. Board makers may need to write some low level routines, or even a few higher level libraries. As long as a compiler can generate what might seem to be a function call into this API, and pass data back and forth, we should be able to do something, and do it transparently to the end user. The end user doesn’t care where the application runs. Only that it runs faster. Now the question I hope we get is not “prove that there will be a market” but how big is this going to get … I have a nice answer for that. Hopefully I will get a chance to give it.