I need your help to save the world from boredom and proprietary standards. Together we can prevent a future where we have to wait for media-intensive applications to finish processing.  Don’t make me wait endlessly for a video to transcode from one format to another, or twiddle my thumbs waiting for the search function to find that picture of my favorite niece. OK, enough marketing ….

 

The AMD engineering team has posted our ATI Stream SDK v2.0 for OpenCL 1.0.  Now you can have the ability to tap into the full processing performance available from multi-core CPUs and GPUs at the same time, using an industry standard language.  Write it once, use the OpenCL compiler of choice from the different hardware vendors, and you are now running your app across different platforms.  (Notice we’re not stuck on the single vendor, GPU or CPU-only path favored by others in our industry.) 

 

I’m not the only one who sees the potential of open standards in this arena.  Many of our technology partners do as well.  Listen to David McAllister, director of open source and standards at Adobe:

 

“Adobe is a strong believer in industry standards; they allow developers to focus on innovation instead of platform support,” said David McAllister, director Open Source and Standards, Adobe.   “The ATI Stream SDK with OpenCL is a solid implementation of a strong standard.”

 

And Corel:

 

“Corel plans to integrate OpenCL into our digital media products and we believe it will offer significant benefits to Corel, our customers and partners,” said Jeremy Liang, senior vice president of Digital Media Development, Corel.  “With this new open standard, AMD will be providing drivers to take advantage of the latest CPU and GPU features which we anticipate will improve the overall performance of our digital media applications running on AMD platforms, while simultaneously reducing our development efforts in this area.”

 

As an industry insider, it’s obvious that the GPU (working together with the CPU) is the next frontier to help dramatically increase the performance of PC and server platforms, especially for some of the most popular applications.   The YouTube and iPhone generation have made distribution and consumption of high definition media pervasive.   Everyone’s a producer and consumer of moving and still images, distributing their content to their spheres of influence worldwide over the Internet, and over the home network.  With OpenCL, now we have an industry standard to accelerate those applications and make them easier and faster to use.

 

Don’t take my word for it; you can see HP and AMD’s director of ATI Stream technology, Patti Harrell, talk more about how OpenCL influences this trend here. 

 

My colleague, Simon Solotko, has an excellent companion blog that gives another perspective on the relationship between, OpenCL, AMD’s traditional support for industry standards, and the new ATI Stream SDK v 2.0. 

 

So, please help us all.  Take up the challenge and do something great with OpenCL.  Grab the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 and leverage the power of AMD CPUs and GPUs working together to accelerate your vision.

 

 Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.