AMD says it’s going to adopt the shiny new OpenCL 1.0 standard just ratified the other day by the Khronos Group standards body and integrate an OpenCL-compliant compiler and runtime into its free ATI Stream SDK next year.

And just to prove it can make the deadline, it says its engineering team has already started running code on its initial Stream implementation.

OpenCL is supposed to make it easier to write vendor-neutral applications that can execute on either a system’s CPU or GPU and take advantage of whichever processor is best suited for the task at hand.

It’s become fashionable lately to use GPUs for compute purposes, and AMD sunk a lot into GPUs – an awfully lot – when it bought ATI for a monstrous price.

ATI Stream lets AMD GPUs, working in concert with a system’s CPU, accelerate applications other than graphics programs.

AMD is a founding member of the OpenCL working group in the Khronos Group and has been a vocal proponent of the standard.

AMD is tinkering with its Brook+ tools and plans to provide a transition path for those who want to port their Brook+ code to OpenCL. Brook+ is a high-level open source programming framework provided by AMD as part of its ATI Stream SDK.

It’s adding finer grain data type support, graphics API interoperability, multi-GPU support and thread-level data sharing.

It’s also adding improved support for the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards and several ATI FirePro3D graphics accelerators.

AMD expects to release version 1.4 of the ATI Stream SDK in the first quarter.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said, “Lack of standards has hamstrung the use of graphics processors to accelerate computing. I therefore view the ratification of the OpenCL specification as an important step toward pushing GPU-accelerated software beyond early adopters and into the hands of mainstream businesses and consumers around the world.”

Last month AMD announced plans to release a free download of the ATI Catalyst driver update 8.12, which is supposed to unlock new ATI Stream acceleration capabilities already built into millions of Radeon graphics cards.

The driver should be available for download by now.

AMD also plans to make a free downloadable version of its ATI Avivo Video Converter utility available so users of many Radeon HD graphics cards can use ATI Stream technologies when transcoding video.

See http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html.

Cloud Computing Technology Contributors of 2009
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AJAX & RIA Technology Contributors of 2009
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