14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based AMD has just announced the introduction of the latest version of their ATI Stream SDK, a technology that combines both hardware and software to leverage the performance capabilities of the company's graphics processing units to accelerate compute-intensive applications. The ATI Stream technology is AMD's response to NVIDIA's CUDA, enabling programmers and software developers to use the computer's GPU to improve the performance of their applications.
There are several significant improvements delivered by AMD's ATI Stream SDK v1.4, including feature enhancements to Brook+, performance enhancements to the Brook+ runtime, additional hardware features exposed in the Compute Abstraction Layer, support for the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 consumer graphics card, as well as support for ATI's FirePro 3D V8750, V8770, V7770, V7750, V5700 and V3750, part of AMD's lineup of professional graphics accelerators. With the new release, AMD will enable software developers to take advantage of the enhancements to Brook+, which supports multiple GPUs, finely grained data handling, DirectX interoperability and access to thread-level data sharing.
As with NVIDIA's CUDA, the ATI Stream Software Development Kit enables software developers to take full advantage of the performance capabilities of a computer GPU in order to accelerate those processor demanding applications. This solution is meant to ease the stress over the CPU and provide users with a better overall performance. ATI Stream SDK v1.4 now provides support for AMD's dual-GPU 55nm-based graphics cards, the Radeon HD 3870X2 and the more recent HD 4870X2.
AMD's Stream technology has been introduced back in November last year and was received with enthusiasm, especially since it was going to provide NDVIDA with a run for its money, competing with the CUDA technology. However, NVIDIA's CUDA is currently the more successful solution, having been available on the market for a longer time. This has enabled software developers to get familiarized with the solution and adopt it for some of their current products.