It’s quite amazing how far OpenCL™ has come these last two years, further than many people realize. A recent survey by Evans Data Corporation shows the inevitable success of OpenCL. In this survey respondents ranked the most popular APIs for multi-threaded development.  OpenCL is ranked #2 in North America, #2 in Europe and Middle East, and #3 in Asia-Pacific countries. The highest ranking that CUDA achieves, in any region, is #5.  Let me say that again, OpenCL is more popular than CUDA in all the high-tech regions of the world – everywhere!

Let me reflect for a moment on the factors that I believe have led to this. OpenCL has always been an open standard driven by key semiconductor and software companies, but this in itself is not enough.  No, in my mind, the real change is that the promise of multi-vendor cross-platform support is now a tangible reality.  AMD, Intel, and Nvidia already have OpenCL SDKs publically available, with AMD’s SDK supporting both GPU and X86 CPU. Furthermore, “…ARM is committed to OpenCL…..With our hardware architecture, and (just as importantly) our software architecture, we are supporting all the GPU computing APIs that are needed by the industry to take best advantage of heterogeneous computing” according to Jem Davies¹.  Software vendors are seeing the opportunity — already over 50 leading applications are accelerated by AMD Fusion APUs².

The other key element, of course, is the increasing availability of amazing compute capability in mainstream products. A few weeks ago my wife bought a new laptop containing an AMD A6-3400M APU with AMD Radeon™ HD graphics.  This platform is currently listed by HP as “Starting from $599”³.  AMD A-Series APUs can deliver supercomputer-like performance of more than 500 GFLOPS of raw compute performance⁴ and data transfer rates between the CPU and the GPU can be as high as 15GB per second⁵. But perhaps more importantly, with the exception of the desktop enthusiast space AMD’s client roadmap is entirely based on APUs.  AMD had already shipped over 12 million APUs⁶ as of August of this year, and we’re still counting!

Here’s to a strong future for OpenCL!

¹Jem Davies, Fellow & VP of Technology in the Media Processing Division of ARM

http://blogs.arm.com/multimedia/515-arm-discusses-future-in-keynote-heterogeneous-computing-cpus-and-gpus

²http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-fusion-apus-acc-mr-50-app-2011mar07.aspx

³http://www.shopping.hp.com, October 21^st 2011.

⁴http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-a-series-desktop-2011june30.aspx

⁵A8-3800 with Radeon™ HD 6550D graphics, 8GB DDR3-1333.  http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/app-sdk-2011aug08.aspx

⁶http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-boosts-fusion-apus-2011aug22.aspx

Mark Ireton is the Product Manager for Compute Solutions at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.