AMD Enhances Support for GPGPU Software Development

In case you haven’t been paying attention, this week has been a good one where GPU computation is concerned. We posted our semi-in-depth look at Intel’s Larrabee earlier this week, and shortly afterward, followed-up with responses by NVIDIA regarding their CUDA architecture. Never one to enjoy being ignored, AMD today issued a release stating their adoption of industry standards in GPGPU (General-purpose GPU).

In order to improve the ease of development using AMD’s Steam processing, they have plans to release a substantial set up upgrades for their Stream Software Development Kit, also known as the SDK. The goal is of course to improve efficiency, and given that Intel boasts such simple development on Larrabee and NVIDIA is right there also with CUDA, AMD had to do something. The new upgrades will enhance support specifically for C and C++, something that seems required nowadays.

Also included in the updates is support for DirectX 11, which should show face within the next 18 months. DX10 has yet to truly catch on, but as Vista will only become more widely used within the next two years, DX11 might be the first version past DX9 that people might actually have installed on their PCs.

The improvements are designed to reduce the time and effort needed to produce GPU accelerated applications that run on multiple platforms, by expanding support for industry standard application programming interfaces (APIs) and providing enhanced support for C/C++.