![]() The Open Computing Language is a community effort spearheaded by Apple (yes, makers of the iPod) to offer its customers a familiar, C-like environment for getting at the power in GPUs shipped with the company’s Mac line of computers. ![]() In an attempt to unify the programmer interface, AMD has announced its support for OpenCL. The SDK included AMD’s implementation of the Stanford BrookGPU interface for stream computing, called Brook+, which is available as open source.īut this isn’t an AMD-only world, and AMD recognizes that different programmer interfaces for different hardware is not the way to spur adoption of a technology over the long term. Programmer support continued to evolve with last year’s announcement of the AMD Stream SDK, designed to help developers create accelerated applications for AMD FireStream, ATI FireGL and ATI Radeon GPUs. An early example of the use of acceleration and CTM at that time was the port, which saw a speedup of 30x over a CPU-only implementation. ![]() RapidMind’s Multi-Core Development Platform gives our customers a unique advantage for harnessing the compute capacity of the AMD FireStream 9170 as well as multi-core CPUs.”ĪMD has also worked hard on creating effective interfaces for programmers to its GPGPUs, starting with the company’s first accelerators in 2006 and the CTM, or Close to the Metal, programming interface. In a statement released with that announcement, Patricia Harrell, AMD’s director of Stream Computing, said “AMD Stream embraces an open-systems approach to the GPU and is pleased to be working with RapidMind as we grow our ecosystem of software and service provider partners. RapidMind’s development tools allow one code base to be targeted at multicore processors, GPGPUs, and the Cell B/E without changing the code. The RapidMind partnership in particular is interesting in the context of this announcement since it announced support by RapidMind’s Multi-Core Development Platform for the FireStream 9170 - and one assumes that the 9250 can’t be far behind. Last week, AMD announced partnerships with parallel tools providers Rogue Wave and RapidMind in an attempt to expand access to its hardware. The company is emphasizing steps aimed at making GPGPUs easier to program, and at making applications portable among different accelerators. While the timing of the announcement is clearly aimed at drawing interest from the HPC community, AMD is also focused on making this power available to a broader audience. And with a $999 list price, it’s substantially cheaper than the 9170 at $1,999. The new FireStream 9250 is scheduled to be available in the third quarter of this year. But unlike its competitor, the 9250 can handle an impressive 200 gigaflops in 64-bit computations, double the 9170’s 100 gigaflops double precision FP performance. Its friendly FLOPS per watt metric comes with some tradeoffs: the 9250 only sports 1 GB of GDDR3 RAM, four times less than NVIDIA’s T10P, and half that on the original 9170. Combine this platform with AMD’s commitment to making it easier for everybody to get those performance levels, and HPC users have a powerful option for bringing accelerated computing to an application near them. ![]() The 9250 fits in a power envelope that the company says is less than 150 watts, and the card requires a single PCIe slot.ĪMD focused hard on performance with this rev, not only getting to 1 teraflops of single precision performance and an 8 gigaflops per watt metric, but also outstripping the T10P by a factor of two in double precision performance. Like the NVIDIA Tesla T10P also announced yesterday, the 9250 brings just over 1 teraflops of 32-bit (single precision) performance. On Monday AMD announced the FireStream 9250, the company’s latest general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), and the successor to the FireStream 9170 product announced last year. Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them ![]()
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