Thursday, June 7th 2012
AMD Continues OpenCL Leadership With First Fully-Conformant OpenCL 1.2 Solution
AMD today announced continued leadership in driving OpenCL adoption with availability of the AMD APP SDK 2.7, featuring the first conformant implementation of OpenCL 1.2 and comprehensive support for C++. The new SDK expands the OpenCL application ecosystem by providing developers a powerful, cross-platform solution to unlock the performance of AMD GPUs, APUs, and multi-core CPUs with the added C++ wrapper API and AMD's C++ kernel language for greater efficiency, improved productivity and application robustness.
"AMD continues leading the OpenCL movement, as demonstrated with the release of our latest SDK featuring the industry's first fully-conformant OpenCL 1.2 implementation," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions, AMD. "Our latest development tools empower developers to more easily harness the power of heterogeneous computing to help improve the user experience by making it easy to write applications that can take greater advantage of the compute capabilities of AMD's leading CPUs, GPUs and APUs."
Support for the second generation AMD A-Series APUs and AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs is now available with the AMD APP SDK 2.7. The new SDK also includes updated versions of gDEBugger, APP ML, APP profiler and kernel analyzer updates. For complete details on the AMD APP SDK 2.7 features, capabilities and support, visit the AMD Developer blog or download the AMD APP SDK 2.7 from AMD Developer Central.
AMD APP SDK 2.7 Key Features
OpenCL 1.2
"AMD continues leading the OpenCL movement, as demonstrated with the release of our latest SDK featuring the industry's first fully-conformant OpenCL 1.2 implementation," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Heterogeneous Applications and Developer Solutions, AMD. "Our latest development tools empower developers to more easily harness the power of heterogeneous computing to help improve the user experience by making it easy to write applications that can take greater advantage of the compute capabilities of AMD's leading CPUs, GPUs and APUs."
Support for the second generation AMD A-Series APUs and AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs is now available with the AMD APP SDK 2.7. The new SDK also includes updated versions of gDEBugger, APP ML, APP profiler and kernel analyzer updates. For complete details on the AMD APP SDK 2.7 features, capabilities and support, visit the AMD Developer blog or download the AMD APP SDK 2.7 from AMD Developer Central.
AMD APP SDK 2.7 Key Features
OpenCL 1.2
- Host access flags for memory objects
- Pattern-based GPU buffer and image initialization
- New generalized image creation API
- Enhanced image/buffer map operations
- Defaults for platform, queue, device, etc. significantly reduce the amount of boilerplate code required
- Improved simplified constructors for cl::Buffer and addition of cl::copy functions
- Additional support of events when using functors
- Kernel and function overloading
- Inheritance
- Templates
16 Comments on AMD Continues OpenCL Leadership With First Fully-Conformant OpenCL 1.2 Solution
17MB/s compression is fast but my HDD can take it more so 50MB/s would be nice if CPU and GPU can crunch together...
In truth, AMD has no obligation to make their software work great (i.e 100%) on non-AMD hardware, nor does Nvidia in PhysX nor Intel in their compilers, but then again Intel as well as others have each their own OpenCL "fork" and if need be the devs can adjust. Safe to say that AMD's OpenCL won't cripple support as Nv's PhysX does on CPU. And even if the software works lets say at 50% in OpenCL... you have a 50% increase in performance if you have some sort of video card supporting OpenCL 1.2 on top of the performance you get from your CPU natively. All that from AMD and the devs in question without you even deserving it.
If you use an intel compiler x86, most likely it will work fast on intel cpus and not so fast on non-intel cpus, but its not intentionally, its by nature. The same goes for this c++ AMD OpenCL compiler. It might not generate code optimized for nvidia or intel GPUs. They could even have a hard time making it work fast on their own AMD gpus...
So the fact is, ok, AMD released this c++ thingy, and its fine. Now nvidia should sum up his efforts and make something similar unless the AMD compiler is good enough on nvidia gpus too.
Compile optimizations are intentionally... and you've argued my point, just as intel is not responsible for how intel compiled code works on AMD in the same way AMD is not responsible for how their OpenCL compiled coded works on Nvidia GPUs. As for how hard it's for them, it could be but they are doing it.It's still not perfect, but hey, small steps.
Nvidia, yeah... they're more likely to steal the code, adapt and rebrand it.
Currently, OpenCL code compiled on an Intel or NVIDIA platform run faster (up to 30%) than on AMD's implementation. This could be due to the backporting of features from CUDA to the OpenCL standard, but since it's already part of the standard, AMD needs to keep up.
NVIDIA more likely to steal code? Nope. It's AMD who's more likely to adapt to the standard, because you can't exactly "steal" an open framework.