AMD Spurs Software Development to Benefit from Heterogeneous Compute Architectures and APUs

A development platform created by AMD, the ATI Stream SDK v2.2 brings a wide range of tools to the developer community including support for OpenCL 1.1, in addition to Ubuntu® 10.04 and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.5. This updated development platform empowers the developer community to accelerate applications on the CPU and GPU quickly and efficiently. The new version is available for download today.

Availability of the ATI Stream SDK v2.2 with OpenCL 1.1 support is a great example of how CPU and GPU technology continues to mature and usher in next-generation computing experiences, where voice, touch, gesture and facial recognition capabilities are common, everyday features, said Patricia Harrell, director of Stream Computing, AMD. The enhancements in the ATI Stream SDK v2.2 are especially important due to the support for OpenCL 1.1, which is integral to the forthcoming AMD Fusion family of APUs. These tools allow the developer community to take advantage of heterogeneous computing architectures both today and tomorrow.

As the premier provider of high-quality audio and video codec solutions, MainConcept has a shared vision with AMD to support open standards such as OpenCL, said Muzaffer Beygirci, managing director of MainConcept GmbH. Our upcoming OpenCL H.264/AVC Encoder was built on ATI Stream technology and the OpenCL standard, and we believe ATI Stream-enabled GPU acceleration will be a compelling new feature in our customers' solutions.

ATI Stream SDK v2.2 delivers expanded support for operating systems, compilers, hardware and the latest industry standards, further streamlining application development and acceleration. New features include:

* Support for the OpenCL 1.1 specification, ratified in June 2010, providing developers with the ability to take full advantage of the new features OpenCL 1.1 brings
* Extended operating system support, including Ubuntu® 10.04, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.5
* Increased hardware support including x86 CPUs with SSE2.x or later, allowing users to run OpenCL applications on a greater variety of CPUs
* Additional support for Linux and Windows compilers, including GNU Compiler Collection 4.1 or later, Microsoft® Visual Studio® (MSVS) 2010 Professional Edition and Minimalist GNU (GCC 4.4) for Windows (MinGW)
* Single-channel format support for OpenCL images, providing developers with greater flexibility to access the caches on the GPU
* Support for OpenCL and DirectX® 10 interoperability increasing overall efficiency when displaying computed results to the user
* Support for additional double-precision floating points routines in OpenCL kernels to enable greater computational accuracy in HPC and scientific based applications.