AMD announced its third annual Developer Summit last week. Dubbed “APU13,” the upcoming summit is the AMD equivalent to NVIDIA’s GTC and is an annual event that brings together industry analysts, researchers, programmers, academics, and software/hardware companies pursuing heterogeneous computing technologies.

In previous years, the AMD Developer Summit has been the launchpad for C++ AMP and the HSA Foundation. This year’s Summit will continue that trend towards heterogeneous computing as well as look back over the year and provide updates on where the various HSA member companies are at as far as goals to move towards standards-based heterogenous computing.

In addition to keynote speeches from AMD and some of its partners, expect a great deal of presentations and workshops from researchers and programmers that are working on new programming models and hardware solutions to efficiently use CPU and GPU processors. More information on hUMA is one of the likely topics, for example. Discussion about upcoming hardware, process nodes, and products may also be on the table so far as it relates to the HSA theme. Considering the summit is called “APU13,” I also expect that AMD will reveal additional details on the company’s Kaveri APU as well as a look into its future product road map.

AMD is currently asking for presentation proposals from researchers in a number of HSA and technology-related fields including heterogeneous computing, cloud computing, web technologies, programming languages, gaming and graphics technologies, and software security. The lineup of presenters for the summit is still being worked out, and proposal papers will be accepted until May 10th with the winners being notified over the summer.

In all, AMD’s APU13 should be an exciting and intellectual event. Last year’s AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) was an interesting and fun event to cover, and I hope that APU13 will keep up the same momentum and interest in heterogeneous computing that AFDS started.