14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest news on the web, Advanced Micro Devices has announced today that it plans to rapidly adopt the OpenCL 1.0 programming standard, while also integrating a compliant compiler and runtime into its free ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK). The OpenCL 1.0 has been ratified today by The Khronos Group, an independent standards body having members from the whole computing industry.
The OpenCL programming standard and associated technologies have been developed so as to help better enable developers to write vendor-neutral applications that can be executed on either the CPU or GPU of a system. Through this move, developers are allowed to take advantage of whichever processor they consider as being best suited for the task they need to fulfill.
“The potential benefits of having applications run on both the CPU and GPU within a system are enormous,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “Unfortunately, up until now programmers could only choose proprietary programming languages that limited their ability to write vendor-neutral, cross-platform applications. With today’s ratification of OpenCL 1.0, I’m happy to say those days are over. Developers now have a better, truly open choice.”
AMD has long been a founding and contributing member of the OpenCL working group and has also proved an active proponent of the standard. AMD announced it plans to put the technology into the hands of programmers as soon as possible, and it quickened the development of the ATI Stream SDK. The company says it has been making progress with its OpenCL-compliant offering, and expects to be able to release a developer version of the SDK with support for OpenCL 1.0 in the first half of 2009. AMD's engineers are reported to have already started running code on OpenCL's initial implementation.
AMD also stated it keeps working on the improvement of its Brook+ tools and that it plans to offer a transition road for those willing to port their Brook+ code to OpenCL. Many of you might already know that Brook+ is an open source, high-level programming framework AMD delivers as part of the free ATI Stream SDK.
The ATI Stream SDK 1.4 is being built on the significant enhancements of the 1.3 version, and is designed so as to bring finer grain data type support, graphics API interoperability, multi-GPU support and thread-level data sharing to Brook+. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards will see enhanced support, while several ATI FirePro 3D graphics accelerators will also be supported. According to AMD, the 1.4 version of the SDK should be ready in the first quarter of 2009.
“Lack of standards has hamstrung the use of graphics processors to accelerate computing,” said Gordon Haff, Principal IT advisor, Illuminata. “I therefore view the ratification of the OpenCL specification as an important step toward pushing GPU-accelerated software beyond early adopters and into the hands of mainstream businesses and consumers around the world.”
We should also note that AMD announced about a month ago its plans to unleash the ATI Stream acceleration capabilities featured by its ATI Radeon graphics cards. It will do so as soon as the ATI Catalyst 8.12 release of its drivers becomes available this month.