Linux Mobile: AMD joins the MeeGo project

One of the first announcements made at the MeeGo Conference 2010 concerned the entry of chipset manufacturer AMD into the MeeGo project, confirming the company’s ambition to enter the mobile processors market.

Representatives from AMD, the world’s second largest processor manufacturer, have been preparing the terrain for a few weeks now, for the announcement that they would soon be invited to enter the mobile market.

The presentation of the group’s quarterly earnings was used to unveil various products roadmaps, with some clearly oriented towards netbooks, tablets and Smartphone’s.

Of course these devices won’t be available and powered by the first AMD mobile processors until the end of 2011, and more likely in 2012, but the manufacturer is certainly interested in various industrial initiatives.

With the opening of the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin, Ireland, we should start to get more details about the dynamics of the ecosystem being created, although no mobile handset will be present (Stephen Elop – Nokia’s president confirmed that these won’t be available before 2011). AMD has used the event to announce that they will be joining the MeeGo project (supervised by the Linux Foundation), along with founding members Nokia and Intel, their fiercest rival.


AMD to participate in the development of MeeGo
Ben Bar-Haim – corporate vice president, software development at AMD, and Chris Schlaeger, AMD’s Director of Operating System Research Centre director,  were both present at the event, confirming their support of the development company while announcing that they would be allocating engineers to the project to help advance MeeGo’s development.

The two AMD representatives had trouble hiding their enthusiasm for the opportunities which would be made possible with MeeGo:

"MeeGo represents an exciting, open-source mobile operating system we expect to be adopted by mobile and embedded device makers over time," said Ben Bar-Haim. "We are glad to provide engineering resources to joint industry efforts like MeeGo and expect that this operating system will help drive our embedded plans and create expanded market opportunities for our forthcoming Accelerated Processing Units (APU)."

APU’s are AMD’s answer to combining GPU’s and CPU’s in a unique system, which can also be adapted to MeeGo’s needs – notably in the netbook market but also in relation to Smartphone’s where powerful GPU’s are required to be able to provide the most up to date functions (HD video decoding, 3D, etc).