The framework is extremely important for multi-threaded computing

Feb 20, 2008 11:40 GMT  ·  By
Open-sourcing is a common practice: You get your products developed for free
   Open-sourcing is a common practice: You get your products developed for free

AMD today announced that it has released the AMD Performance Library code to the open-source community. The new application set is now called "Framewave version 1.0," and aims at increasing the Library's functionality beyond the already implemented core media capabilities.

Open-sourcing applications and even the hardware has been a common practice among the producers that are looking for community-driven feature enhancements. AMD will still maintain the project through its own software engineers, to coordinate and contribute to the Framewave project.

Frameware is a huge code library comprised of thousands of routines dedicated to image and signal processing, that helps coder in developing additional projects such as media players, codecs, image editors, audio applications and media streaming software.

"As a long time supporter of open innovation and collaboration, AMD's release of its APL code to the Framewave open source project represents another milestone contribution to the open source community. We believe that Framewave will quickly become a significant resource for developers, helping them to build faster, highly optimized and multi-threaded applications more efficiently," said Earl Stahl, vice president of Software Development, AMD. "Developer collaboration is one of the cornerstones of AMD's software vision, so we are excited to see what innovations the community will develop leveraging Framewave."

Frameware is the result of almost three years of continual development born from the joint efforts of over a dozen developers. It contains over 3200 high-performance software routines, but the most important aspect of the framework is the multi-threaded approach to the x86-class processor platforms. The software is fully compatible with Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives.

"We applaud AMD's decision to open source the Framewave library as we think it will only help accelerate the development of new multimedia applications that fully take advantage of multi-core x86 processors," said Ed Leonard, CTO at Dreamworks Animation. "Dreamworks Animation continues to produce some of the world's most creative and successful CGI films in part, because of the state-of-the-art technology we leverage every day. As an innovator and adopter of new technology, we commend AMD's efforts with Framewave."