AMD prepares the ground for ARM's OpenCL support

CHIP DESIGNER AMD has said that OpenCL GPGPU support in chips is vital for the laptop and tablet markets.

Leslie Sobon, VP of product and platform marketing told The INQUIRER that OpenCL, the GPGPU programming language that AMD backs, it vital to "bringing X86 down to the ARM space". However more telling is the fact that while AMD showed off 20 or so laptops and netbooks at its event in Berlin, not a single tablet with a Fusion chip was on display.

AMD spent a good percentage of its Llano showpiece event to get the analyst outfit IDC to talk up its laptop prospects, saying that while sales of tablets will continue to grow, laptops will remain the dominant force. It appeared almost as though AMD's biggest competitor is not Intel but rather ARM, which features in just about every tablet on the market today.

So it was with some surprise that we saw AMD hold a closed panel discussion between HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and itself. Lenovo launched the ARM-based Ideapad at CES this year and HP is readying the launch of the long awaited Touchpad, which also uses an ARM chip, and of course Microsoft has generated a lot of press with its decision to release an ARM version of Windows 8.

All of the panelists talked about user experience being the differentiator for devices but none would go into any detail. It left The INQUIRER wondering whether these new user experiences will all be coming from non-X86 devices.

Asked whether AMD is having to work hard to convince developers to code for X86 rather than ARM, Sobon told The INQUIRER "not much [work] at all", citing the appearance of ARM's VP of its technology and media division at AMD's Fusion Developer Summit. Sobon moved the discussion away from AMD and ARM by saying, "the challenge is not around X86 or ARM [so] much as it is the experience it gives the end user".

The idea that there is harmony between AMD and ARM is a little harder to stomach when The INQUIRER, and presumably other media outlets, got an email from ARM saying it wanted to wax lyrical about the graphical capabilities in its Mali graphics core. That in itself is not particularly interesting, after all every company wants to promote its wares, but "the experience" Sobon talks about is far more than just gaming, rather, complex user interaction with computers, as in the film Minority Report.

ARM said of its Mali 400 GPU, "It is not only in gaming, graphics for user interfaces (UI) have also improved dramatically as we moved from text based menus to touch UIs, and looking toward the future, ARM will enable gesture and 3D UIs." That sounds almost identical to AMD's vision - pardon the pun - of what its accelerated processor units (APUs) can enable.

As for the truly impressive user interfaces that people have come to dream about, Sobon said that those are still 15 years off. However for gesture driven interfaces, Sobon said that she expects the software and hardware to turn up in the next two to three years.

ARM, along with AMD and others, is a member of the Kronos consortium that oversees OpenCL and if it decides to take AMD's advice and use OpenCL in its future graphics cores then AMD could find it harder than ever to break into the tablet market. And given Microsoft's push with ARM support in Windows 8, AMD might well start to wonder whether it needs to add ARM to its list of competitors. µ