AMD outs sol'ns for heterogeneous computing apps

AMD has unleashed its unified software development kit (SDK), an improved CodeXL tool suite with added features and support for the latest AMD hardware, and added heterogeneous acceleration in popular open source libraries. These tools claim to provide a substantial step forward in productivity and ease-of-use for developers wishing to harness the full power of modern heterogeneous platforms spanning form servers to PCs to handheld devices, stated the firm.

The unified SDK includes AMD APP SDK 2.9 and is the most user-friendly heterogeneous computing SDK yet. It provides improved ease-of-use and developer productivity by adding several capabilities. This is AMD's first step toward providing developers with simple access to all the programmable components of the company's products. Some of the salient features are: a Web-based sample browser that makes it easy to find the right samples for a project; added support for CMake, a make utility; improved OpenCL source editing with a plug-in to visual studio; and the addition of several samples highlighting use of optimized open source libraries (OpenCV, Bolt) to get acceleration with minimal effort.

The unified SDK also includes the Media SDK v1.0 beta release. This will be AMD's first public release of the Media SDK, which enables developers to leverage AMD's unique and differentiated multimedia capabilities. Some of the key features of the Media SDK are a GPU-accelerated video pre/post processing library and a library for low latency video encoding.

The unified SDK also promotes heterogeneous acceleration optimizations in several open source libraries with the goal of making it simple for developers to accelerate applications. These include: OpenCV (most popular computer vision library) now with many OpenCL accelerated functions; clMath with accelerated BLAS and FFT libraries accessible from Fortran, C and C++; and Bolt, a C++ template library providing GPU off-load for common data-parallel algorithms, now with cross-OS support as well as performance improvements and new functionality.

The latest CodeXL tools suite (version 1.3,) AMD's comprehensive heterogeneous developer tool offering, now supports Java. To further AMD's efforts to provide the best integrated tool suite, AMD has incorporated static kernel analysis capabilities. Also included in this release are added support for remote debugging/profiling to enable server and embedded customers as well as support for the latest GPU products from AMD (GCN-based discrete GPUs and APUs.)