Advanced Micro Devices this week announced the availability of the ATI Stream software development kit (SDK) v2.1, the latest update of its ATI Stream SDK supporting OpenCL industry standard-based programming on AMD x86 central processing units (CPUs) and ATI graphics processing units (GPUs). The new SDK is designed to deliver maximum performance on the forthcoming accelerated processing units (APUs) that feature both CPU and GPU cores.

“With the anticipated arrival of the AMD Fusion family of APUs next year, we can support developers who want to begin creating next-generation software experiences for APUs now. The ATI Stream SDK puts the developer community on the path to success by providing access to the CPU and GPU system resources already available to them today,” said Ben Bar-Haim, general manager of AMD Canada and corporate vice president of software engineering at AMD.

The first product from the Fusion family is code-named Llano that will feature up to four Phenom II-class x86 cores, integrated DDR3 memory controller as well as ATI Radeon HD 5000-class graphics core, which fully supports OpenCL 1.0 and is optimized for general purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU).

ATI Stream SDK helps developers accelerate application performance by leveraging the CPU and GPU resources in a given system. The new version of SDK brings additional performance-enhancing features, increases ease-of-programming and expands hardware support, and is available for download today. In particular the ATI Stream SDK version 2.1 include the following:

• Support for OpenCL / OpenGL interoperability, helping reduce the overhead of passing data for display purposes, enabling a richer and more responsive visual experience for the user.
• Support for OpenCL byte addressable stores allowing more natural and efficient code for applications, such as image processing, that depend on the ability to update data at smaller than 32-bit granularities.
• Support for OpenCL images, providing developers with access to hardware-accelerated texture features on AMD GPUs.
• OpenCL extension support for AMD media operations in OpenCL, giving developers a set of OpenCL kernel operations commonly used in multimedia applications.
• OpenCL extension support for device fission in OpenCL, enabling developers to sub-divide an OpenCL device and allowing multiple work kernels to be assigned to that device.
• Integration of Stream KernelAnalyzer 1.5 installer, which helps developers to statically analyze OpenCL kernel performance on AMD graphics processors.
• Support for next-generation ATI FirePro professional graphics cards, including the industry’s most powerful professional graphics card ever created1, the ATI FirePro V8800, and the latest ATI Radeon and ATI Mobility Radeon graphics from AMD.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Fusion, Llano, Phenom, 32nm, GPGPU, Radeon