After announcing its latest chipset with integrated graphics, Advanced Micro is showing clear signs of thinking well ahead into the future. A rep for the company just announced today plans for extending the efforts in the adoption of the next-generation GPGPU software development. What that actually means is that, in a not-too-distant future, we will get to see AMD's next-generation Radeons provide support for Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 11.

The company plans to add full support for Microsoft DirectX 11 and OpenCL, to enable increased C/C++ Cross-Platform programming efficiency, by providing a series of Stream Software Development Kit (SDK) updates in the next 18 months. The upcoming improvements are meant to reduce the time and effort needed to produce GPU accelerated applications that run on multiple platforms. AMD plans to achieve this by extending its support for industry APIs and C/C++.

"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."

On the same occasion, AMD also announced that it was going to keep supporting the efforts towards the development of OpenCL as an open standard. Furthermore, there are plans of making its Stream SDK compliant with OpenCL.

By putting itself behind the efforts for the development of both DirectX 11 and OpenCL, AMD clearly demonstrates its intentions of giving programmers a maximum of choice and flexibility. It also provides us with a better insight into the company's business strategy.

For those who would like to know more of AMD's Stream SDK, the company has set up a dedicated web page, which you can access here.