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AMD Drives Adoption of Industry Standards in GPGPU Software Development |
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Written by Dragana Dimitrijevic
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Thursday, 07 August 2008 |
AMD announced efforts to help further increase the ease and efficiency of software development using AMD Stream processing with an extensive set of upgrades planned for future versions of the Stream Software Development Kit (SDK).
The improvements are designed to reduce the time and effort needed to produce GPU accelerated applications that run on multiple platforms, by expanding support for industry standard application programming interfaces (APIs) and providing enhanced support for C/C++.
About AMD Stream
AMD Stream is a set of open AMD technologies that allow the hundreds of
parallel Stream cores inside AMD GPUs to accelerate general purpose
applications, resulting in platforms capable of delivering dramatically
high performance-per-watt. The freely distributed, fully open Stream
SDK allows programmers to make advanced use of AMD hardware, and helps
them to create fast, energy efficient applications on a growing variety
of platforms and operating systems. |
Through a series of updates to the SDK scheduled over the course of the next 18 months, AMD plans to add full support for DirectX 11, the next-generation suite of advanced APIs from Microsoft.
DirectX 11 is expected to build upon the already outstanding performance of DirectX 10.1 for 3-D graphics rendering and gaming control. It is also being designed to introduce a host of new technologies aimed at making it easier for programmers to create general purpose graphics processing (GPGPU) accelerated applications that can run on any Windows Vista powered platform.
“Just as it ushered in the era of advanced 3-D gaming for the masses, DirectX is poised to be at the vanguard of the GPGPU revolution,” said Anantha Kancherla, manager of Windows desktop and graphics technologies, Microsoft. “DirectX 11 gives developers the power to more easily harness the astonishing capabilities of AMD GPUs for general purpose computation, and gives consumers an effortless way to experience all that AMD Stream has to offer, on the hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows powered systems worldwide.”
As previously announced AMD is also supporting efforts to develop OpenCL as an open standard and plans to evolve the Stream SDK to be OpenCL compliant. Through equal support for both DirectX 11 and OpenCL, and by continuing to give developers the option of creating and using their own programming languages and high level tools, AMD is executing on a strategy designed to give programmers maximum choice and flexibility.
“Industry standards are essential to unlocking the compute potential of GPUs and driving broad adoption of this capability in mainstream applications,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD. “GPGPU is now moving past the era of closed and fully proprietary development chains. With the advent of DirectX 11 and OpenCL, C/C++ programmers worldwide will have standardized and easier ways of leveraging the GPU’s computational capabilities.”
AMD will also continue to enhance and support the Brook+ programming language, providing programmers a stable, high-performance platform for accelerating their applications.
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