AMD has unveiled a new update to ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), which supports OpenCL industry standard-based programming on AMD GPUs and x86 CPUs.
The company said that the new collaborative computing model will be enhanced in the upcoming AMD Fusion Family of accelerated processing units (APUs). The new version brings additional performance-enhancing features, increases ease-of-programming and expands hardware support.
According to AMD, the new features supported by ATI Stream SDK v2.1 include, support for OpenCL / OpenGL interoperability; support for OpenCL byte addressable stores allowing more efficient code for apps such as image processing, that depend on the ability to update data at smaller than 32-bit granularities; and support for OpenCL images to provide developers with access to hardware-accelerated texture features on AMD GPUs.
The new version also features OpenCL extension support for AMD media operations in OpenCL, giving developers a set of OpenCL kernel operations commonly used in multimedia apps; and support for device fission in OpenCL to help developers sub-divide an OpenCL device and allow multiple work kernels to be assigned to that device, the company said.
In addition, the integration of Stream KernelAnalyser 1.5 installer helps developers to statically analyse OpenCL kernel performance on AMD graphics processors. It supports ATI FirePro professional graphics cards including ATI FirePro V8800, ATI Radeon and ATI Mobility Radeon graphics.
AMD said that the Fusion delivers serial, parallel and visual compute capabilities for HD video, 3D and data-intensive workloads in a single die processor called an Accelerated Processing Unit that combines high-performance serial and parallel processing cores with other special-purpose hardware accelerators.
Ben Haim, general manager AMD Canada and corporate vice president of software engineering, AMD, said: “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.
“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.”
