All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. - H.L. Mencken
|
|
|
AMD releases an SDK for its Llano chips
CHIP DESIGNER AMD has released its Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) software development kit (SDK) giving developers access to its accelerated processor units (APU).
In June AMD launched its A-Series Llano APUs that combine the CPU and GPU on a single chip. It is hoping that as firms build more applications to make use of the GPU it can get away from the CPU arms race it has been in with Intel since the 1970s.
To make that happen AMD needs to get developers to use OpenCL, and it hopes that its APP SDK will do just that. Version 2.5 of the SDK has a number of performance improvements that give developers access to greater bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, which with the A-series Llano chips now stands at 15GB/s, as well as improved runtime efficiency.
Manju Hegde, VP of AMD's Fusion Experience Program said, "Improving performance and programmability on AMD platforms is a key initiative for us, and we work closely with developers to help us make the APU the best possible development platform,"
AMD will need to work hard with developers so they can make use of the GPU that comes with an A-series chip. There's no doubt that having a fully programmable OpenCL GPU on die is the future, but as AMD is the first to offer such a chip it needs to put everything it has into helping software developers produce code that uses the considerable power of its integrated GPUs.
AMD's APP SDK is available now for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux. µ
Tags: Amd
Share this:
Share
Dear TheInquirer-Team,
I like to critic your article heavily.
The new 2.5 SDK is more bugy and slower.
Except of fixing long standing issues they introduced new Bugs which make the new SDK kinda unuseable for any serious OpenCL development.
I like to proof it with AMDs own Forum:
http://forums.amd.com/forum/categories.cfm?catid=390
AMD does not assist developers.
Not us, not anyone else much.
We implement cryptographic solutions in OpenCL. This is from my leading developer.
About speed:
16:23 <milen we do about 107
16:23 <milen ok we did
16:23 <milen with sdk 2.5 we do about 92
I am not aware that AMD answered even any Developer in a "good" way. You can also ask programmers like "atom" who makes the "hashcat"-tool.
Critical (also for business) things are broken like the support for offline compiling, multi GPU support and Mr. Hegde said:
"Improving performance and programmability on AMD platforms is a key initiative for us, and we work closely with developers to help us make the APU the best possible development platform,"
I do not know with whom they do work "closely" but from my own point of view it's clearly not with my developers nor other people I am aware off. And whoever they do work together with seams to not test anything crucical.
Please consider to forard my critic to Mr. Hegde. I also could provide him a point of contact with multiple developers because none seams to be statisfied and they all (not just my leading developer) feel disappointed.
17:18 <milen and 2.5 does not help
17:18 <milen just the opposite
My company does not develop Games, we develop an application which uses cryptographic algorithms and computes those on the GPU. Like many other (also scinetific) developers we have partly different needs compared to a Gamedeveloper.
Maybe some things get solved with a new Catalist Driver but I partly doubt it.
I hope you like to read a statement from somebody who uses the SDK and is actively developing something in OpenCL.
Kind regards,
Sebastian Rother
--
Geschäftsführer | CEO
--
Name: Sebastian Rother
E-Mail: srother@mercenary-security.com
GPG key: 4FE59B01
Key fingerprint: 7F36 12C2 689A 57E8 AB2A B164 F24E BADE 4FE5 9B01
Homepage: https://www.mercenary-security.com/