AMD releases CodeXL 1.0

Monday 03rd December 2012, 09:09:00 AM, written by Alex Voicu

After being announced with(out) much fanfare at AFDS2012, CodeXL, ATI's latest take on a GPU Compute tool-chain, finally made it out of Beta and has a proper 1.0 version. Whilst we know that it's posh to harp about how it's all about heterogeneity and all that hoopla, we're old enough to remember that we have pretty awesome CPU profiling / development tools already, so if there was a problem to be solved it was firmly rooted in the GPU side of the garden. Be honest, printf style debugging is not that cool when it's not a means of impressing buddies, but actually the only thing you have available.

Since we've had only limited experiences with CodeXL, we can but have a few remarks. The first and most important one is that ATI, ever careful not to outdo NVIDIA, made sure not to support Visual Studio 2012 or C++ AMP at release. After all, both of them came completely out of the blue more than one year ago, such surprises are difficult to anticipate! Moreover, CodeXL 1.0 doesn't work with the OpenCL Static C++ Kernel Language proposal that ATI authored - that had the potential of making OCL a bit more useful, so it's only proper form to nip it in the bud with non-existent documentation and no means of in-depth profiling. Some other OCL1.2 functions are unsupported as well.

Now that we've gotten our Grinchy juices flowing, we'll admit to being rather enthused by CodeXL finally making it out. In effect, we urge GPU tormentors everywhere to grab it and mess with it, because ATI did a good job overall, and non-primitive tooling is key to useful GPU uses. We'll drop the download link on our way out, also mentioning that you may want to keep your sight on ATI's developer site if you're also interested in the APP SDK, since we have a rather strong feeling that version 2.8 is inbound soon: http://developer.amd.com/tools/heterogeneous-computing/codexl/

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ati ± amd, gpgpu

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