AMD OpenCL development platform for CPU and GPU

Tuesday 13th October 2009, 07:35:00 PM, written by Rys

AMD has had OpenCL support for their CPUs available in their Stream SDK for a little while now, with the missing link being support on the GPU.  Today's release of a beta version of the brand new 2.0 Stream SDK fixes that, with compliant OpenCL 1.0 support for everything from the HD 4350 up, including multi-GPU SKUs.

The kit supports Windows and Linux, both 32- and 64-bit, and multiple compilers (including ICC) too, which might be a real boon depending on what you're doing with the host platform and other software.

The Stream SDK still supports driving the GPU via CAL, if that's how you currently drive ATI graphics hardware for general compute, and there are myriad bug fixes and little tweaks and enhancements here and there.

CPU support targets the SSE3 SIMD hardware on AMD's processors for many ops, and together with the existing OpenCL supports on the CPU, it means that AMD are the first vendor to release a developer kit with support for CPU and GPU together.

Language support appears to be limited to C at the moment, but that will likely change.

If you're in any way GPU compute inclined, you should take a look at the kit.

Discuss on the forums

ati ± opencl, compute, conformance, khronos, stream, beta

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