What I also get is – it’s about so much more than playing games.

The “more” is around something called DirectCompute. In many ways it’s the feature that my favorite applications are going to benefit from more than any other so I thought it would be worth spending a blog on.

DirectCompute is a component of the DirectX11 API to be released with Windows 7. It is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute and enables applications to take advantage of the massively parallel computing power of the GPU.

What does DirectCompute mean for users? Simple: you have two great processors in your PC – one CPU and one GPU. And your system can use both to solve problems. For some workloads, like GPU-accelerated video transcoding and rendering, this combination can really speed up your throughput.

So as you begin compiling your holiday wish list, keep your eye out for systems with this astounding GPU compute capability. But here’s my caveat emptor. When you look at specifications of GPUs, it is important to note there are different levels of support provided for DirectCompute.

One level, which AMD terms DirectCompute 10, runs on the legacy path of the DirectX 11 API to support previous generation of DirectX 10/10.1 GPUs. If offered a system with this feature, just say no.  You should demand what we at AMD call Direct Compute 11. This is the only version designed to unlock the full feature set of DirectX 11 and, as I mentioned previously, the only architecture that is fundamentally designed to enable GPU compute. 

For developers, DirectCompute 11 represents a paradigm shift for GPU compute development. It will now be much more straightforward for developers to code using this architecture. No longer will they have to do contortions and jump through hoops to code what they want to. DirectCompute enables new algorithms that were not possible previously. Some examples of these advanced techniques are order independent transparency, ray tracing, better shadows, and depths of field. If you are interested in more details, you can read this white paper. DirectCompute is a de-facto  industry standard for developers of GPU-compute applications and as such, it should not be confused with  proprietary APIs  (and by “proprietary” I mean supported by only one supplier’s hardware).  

These are some of the reasons why at AMD, we are excited about the ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 Series graphics products. It’s not only the first and only GPUs in the market with full DirectX 11 support it is the only one to unlock the full feature set of Windows 7 and DirectCompute 11.We are proud of this technology leadership. We believe this industry standard will accelerate industry adoption of GPU compute applications running on Windows7 and add a new dimension to the end user’s computing experience.

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.

We still believe that.

One of the ways Fusion comes to life is in how a PC is much more than an X86 CPU. The various elements of the PC platform coalesce to improve the user experience and enable the system to get its work done, seamlessly. In that same sense, let us consider how the Fusion brand is being made real every day with ATI Stream technology.

Our ATI Stream technology, which is about sharing workloads between the CPU and the GPU, divides software execution between the various compute engines at the platform level.  Today, more and more applications are highly parallel in their execution, either because the task at hand lends itself to this approach or because software programmers want to take full advantage of the increasingly popular multi-core processors, or perhaps a combination of both. 

This may be a behind the scenes, but its impact is likely very real for you. 

A good example is how video encoding and decoding − or “transcoding” as it is known − has become a mainstream, daily event for the YouTube generation. 

It has fast become central to many consumers’ experience to make digital video content available on any screen size and resolution, high definition or standard, regardless of how the original content was formatted.  What many consumers don’t realize is that this is a highly complex problem that can consume huge amounts of compute resources, often requiring hours rather than minutes or seconds to complete.

As it turns out, transcoding is a highly parallel computing problem, with relatively few instructions being hammered against a huge amount of data, something that graphics processors are particularly good at doing.  To that end, we are working closely with ISVs like Cyberlink and ArcSoft to help them embed a video transcoder in their applications that can leverage ATI Stream technology to greatly accelerate transcoding.  We even offer a free, basic utility that performs video transcoding on many of our latest ATI Radeon™ graphics cards, using the latest ATI Catalyst™ 9.5 driver.  Click here for a blog that includes a “how to” video showing how easy it is to work with video files and the ATI Video Converter.

Beyond transcoding, programmable ATI GPUs are rapidly expanding their role in compute platforms to perform diverse tasks, such as taking advantage of their hundreds of cores for protein folding in life-science research, seismic simulations for geophysical exploration, data encryption and many more applications through ATI Stream.  You can see here how financial data analysis is greatly accelerated with a GPU. 

What is particularly exciting about ATI Stream technology is where it is going.  Programming multi-core architectures is getting more standardized and straight-forward through the OpenCL specification, something AMD is already leveraging.   AMD showed an OpenCL demonstration of Havok Cloth™ game physics at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC). 

And because OpenCL is exactly that − free and open − the barrier to entry for programming multi-core systems is getting lower.

Later this year, AMD plans to release a new ATI Stream Software Development Kit which will make OpenCL widely available for AMD hardware.  Also planned are modifications at the chip-level designed to leverage the OpenCL specification. 

I will talk more about ATI Stream throughout the year with other specific examples of how AMD’s unique combination of CPU and GPUs are supercharging performance.  In the meantime, you can read more about this here.

And as we like to say, The Future is Fusion.

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.