AMD has always been an advocate of open standards that build on and extend proven technologies (example: x86-64)W.  As such, it is a natural fit for AMD to embrace OpenCL as part of its ATI Stream offering.  But, just what is OpenCL? 

In this month's episode of the AMD Developer Inside Track I interview Mike Houston, GPG System Architect.  He talks about what OpenCL is, what the transition to this new language will be like and he gets into what applications could benefit from OpenCL, as well as what the future has in store for software applications that use it.   

One of the advantages of OpenCL is its advanced queuing system which is great for game development. It is also designed to work very well with various graphics APIs such as OpenGL, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. 

Game developers aren't the only ones who can take advantage of OpenCL though.  According to Michael, it is going to be very useful for applications such as media encoding, virus scanning, and physics to name a few.  It makes a lot of sense for AMD to move to a ubiquitous computing language that runs on platforms everywhere.  The next few years will be an interesting time for GPGPU technology as several hardware and software vendors get on board. 

ATI Stream technology is gaining significant momentum.  Some cool and unexpected examples of ATI Stream technology in action are:

• Folding@home: http://folding.stanford.edu/
• Milkyway@home: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

An example of gaming technology and OpenCL:

• Havoc demo: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/27/havok-and-amd-show-off-opencl-with-pretty-pretty-dresses/

Watch the AMD Developer Inside Track, Episode 2 for the full story.

 -Sharon Troia, AMD Developer Outreach

The information presented in this document is for informational purposes only and may contain technical inaccuracies, omissions and typographical errors. Links to third party sites are for convenience only, and no endorsement is implied.

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Nice you linked Milkyway. Actually you could have even mentioned that ATI cards completely dominates the performance there, as it is uses double precision calculations. A HD4870 has roughly a factor 5 advantage to the fastest nv card card right now.

And there is already a second BOINC project (I'm also a bit involved in ) with an ATI app, Collatz Conjecture. With a BOINC beta client they already support the automatic download of the application to capable hosts (everything after R600, even IGPs are supported). And by the way, ATI cards are also a bit faster then their nv counterparts at this project, if that is of any interest .

Thanks for the support Andreas.  Our legal folks don't usually like us to say we are the "fastest" at anything without having public benchmarks to back it up, which is understandable.  But, I'm glad to have developers such as yourself say it for us! 

Glad you added the link as well, I'm really excited to see OpenCL build momentum!!

The information presented in this document is for informational purposes only and may contain technical inaccuracies, omissions and typographical errors. Links to third party sites are for convenience only, and no endorsement is implied.

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