AMD today announced the availability of the ATI Stream
Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.1, the latest update of its ATI Stream
SDK supporting OpenCL industry standard-based programming on AMD GPUs
and x86 CPUs. ATI Stream SDK helps developers accelerate application
performance by leveraging the CPU and GPU resources in a given system.
This collaborative computing model will be enhanced in the upcoming AMD
Fusion Family of accelerated processing units (APUs). The new version
brings additional performance-enhancing features, increases
ease-of-programming and expands hardware support, and is available for download today.
“With the anticipated arrival of the AMD Fusion family of APUs next
year, we can support developers who want to begin creating
next-generation software experiences for APUs now,” said Ben Bar-Haim,
general manager AMD Canada and corporate vice president of Software
Engineering, AMD. “The ATI Stream SDK puts the developer community on
the path to success by providing access to the CPU and GPU system
resources already available to them today.”
New features supported by the ATI Stream SDK v2.1 include:
- Support for OpenCL/OpenGL interoperability, helping reduce
the overhead of passing data for display purposes, enabling a richer and
more responsive visual experience for the user. - Support for OpenCL byte addressable stores allowing more natural
and efficient code for applications, such as image processing, that
depend on the ability to update data at smaller than 32-bit
granularities. - Support for OpenCL images, providing developers with access to
hardware-accelerated texture features on AMD GPUs. - OpenCL extension support for AMD media operations in OpenCL,
giving developers a set of OpenCL kernel operations commonly used in
multimedia applications. - OpenCL extension support for device fission in OpenCL, enabling
developers to sub-divide an OpenCL device and allowing multiple work
kernels to be assigned to that device. - Integration of Stream KernelAnalyzer 1.5 installer, which helps
developers to statically analyze OpenCL kernel performance on AMD
graphics processors. - Support for next-generation ATI FirePro professional graphics
cards, including the industry’s most powerful professional graphics card
ever created, the ATI
FirePro V8800, and the latest ATI Radeon and ATI Mobility Radeon
graphics from AMD.
Accelerated Processing: the next generation of visual
computing
AMD Fusion represents a new approach to processor design and software
development, delivering powerful serial, parallel and visual compute
capabilities for today’s HD video, 3D and data-intensive workloads in a
single-die processor called an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). APUs
combine high-performance serial and parallel processing cores with other
special-purpose hardware accelerators, enabling breakthroughs in visual
computing, security, performance-per-watt and device form factor.
Software developers, utilizing AMD drivers, libraries and either the ATI
Stream SDK or the Microsoft DirectCompute API, can enhance the user
experience and speed application performance by developing applications
that fully utilize the unique compute power of AMD discrete graphics and
the AMD Fusion Family of APUs.
