ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, said in a statement that it is “actively” sampling preview releases of OpenCL-enabled drivers with strategic customers. The move allows developers of software to start playing with OpenCL before the company ships appropriate drivers to end-users.

“We are actively sampling preview releases of OpenCL CPU with a handful of strategic customers and ISVs, each with an assigned application engineer helping them. A public beta and production version of OpenCL is planned to be released as part of ATI Stream SDK v2.0 in the second half of this year,” the statement by ATI/AMD reads.

ATI releases its OpenCL-enabled drivers to select software developers about one and a half months after its arch-rival Nvidia Corp. started to ship its OpenCL-powered pre-beta drivers.

OpenCL cross-platform application programming interface (API) is compatible with stream processors (graphics and/or central processing units) developed by various companies, including AMD, ATI, Intel Corp. or Nvidia and is expected to help to popularize general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) as well as multi-core processing in general.

ATI demonstrated cloth physics simulation using OpenCL API and Havok middle-ware at Game Developers Conference in March, 2009. In fact, considering that Havok has already demonstrated its Cloth middle-ware using ATI Radeon graphics cards, it is obvious that AMD has shipped its first OpenCL-supporting drivers to this particular developer a while ago.

Nvidia demonstrated an OpenCL demo at Siggraph Asia 2008 late last year.

Tags: GPGPU, OpenCL, ATI, AMD, Radeon, Nvidia