AMD today gave the first public demonstration of its second-generation AMD Opteron X-Series APU, codenamed "Berlin," running a Linux environment based on the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored, community-driven Linux distribution, providing an enterprise class operating environment to developers and IT administrators. AMD says the demonstration represents a significant step forward in expanding the footprint of x86 APU accelerated performance within the data center.

AMD's premiere demonstration of "Berlin" showcases the first Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) featured server APU ahead of its official launch later this year. The demonstration features advancements incorporated in "Project Sumatra" that enable Java applications to take advantage of graphics processing units (GPUs) within AMD server APUs. The combination of Linux and Java on AMD APU platforms provides a platform for server-based multimedia workloads and general purpose GPU compute. AMD also demonstrated software-based on OpenCL and OpenGL on "Berlin."

"As servers adapt to new and evolving workloads, it's critical that the software ecosystem support the requirements of these new workloads," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of the Server Business Unit, AMD. "We are actively engaged with a broad set of partners in the data center software community who are bringing to market the software infrastructure to seamlessly enable x86 APU based servers."

AMD is a founding member of the HSA Foundation, an organization dedicated to building ecosystems to support APU technologies.