14 DAY TRIAL // As the fellows over at Advanced Micro Devices are getting ready for the launch of their much-anticipated next-generation Fusion platform, the company is providing developers with yet another release of its Stream SDK. The new ATI Stream Software Development Kit v2.1 has been designed to support OpenCL on both AMD GPUs and x86 CPUs. According to the company, the new release introduces additional performance-enhancing features, while at the same time offering developers the right tools for them to take advantage of an easier programming experience.
“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.”
According to the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker, the new SDK release includes the following new features, as highlighted by the company:
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.
The new SDK v2.1 is available for download following this link.