Reykjavik (Iceland) – Considering the big news coming out of Intel this week (Larrabee) and the expected big News from Nvidia within the next two weeks (x86 CUDA), AMD is under pressure to match its rivals: AMD is making substantial changes to its GPGPU software strategy and announced at its GPG CTO Technology Day that it will ditch its Close-To-Metal platform and switch to OpenCL.   

In his speech GPG CTO Technology Day held in Iceland’s capital, Raja Koduri, CTO of AMD GPG (ex-ATI), announced that AMD believes that the time for proprietary software solutions such as AMD's own Close-to-Metal and Nvidia's CUDA has passed.

As a result, AMD will throw its efforts behind DirectX 11 Computational Shaders and the OpenCL GPGPU language and will focus on standardized solutions only. Koduri highlighted the GPGPU advances made by companies such as CyberLink, PeakStream (which was acquired by Google), RapidMind, RogueWave, CAPS, ImageScan, Telenetics, Neurda and many others. It is apparent that many companies are bringing GPGPU-accelerated products to market, but AMD’s is going a somewhat different way as the company’s stream products will be aligned with DirectX 11 and OpenCL.
Koduri noted that a first product showcasing this strategy will be available in the first quarter of next year. Also, AMD is working on APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) at full speed, which is scheduled for debut in first half of next year.

The decision to go with OpenCL could be a critical step for AMD to compete with Nvidia and Intel’s GPGPU and cGPU products that are capturing the headlines today. AMD’s low-level programming approach was one of the main reasons why developers preferred Nvidia’s (high-level) CUDA version over the company’s stream processor cards. OpenCL is widely considered to be a possible solution of GPGPU programming that could bridge Nvidia, Intel, AMD and other products and we are hearing more and more developers requesting support for OpenCL.
 

Thank Goodness!!!!

Aug 06, 2008 13:54     

Proprietary software sucks rocks.
Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +18

Count me in!

Aug 06, 2008 14:48     

Let the old 3DFX-like times stay in history alone!
salgado report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +13

They want Apple...

Aug 06, 2008 22:12     

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL OpenCL, an Apple initiative, expected to release with OS X 10.6 -- looks like AMD wants to see ATi chips in Macs
MeToo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

FAH

Aug 07, 2008 04:36     

I don't know if high level CUDA is better than ATI's low level solution, but GPU-accelerated Folding @ Home client exists since X1900 (several years ago), and until some weeks ago it did not exist for Nvidia. I've always wondered why took so much time to implement FAH client for Nvidia hardware. Anyway, I think standards are the way to go. What I don't know is if OpenCL will become the standard...

Kurt report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

Hardly surprising

Aug 07, 2008 04:58     

When a company has a strong position on the market it will push it's own solutions as standards - vide M$. When a company loses position it will push in the direction of strengthening standards and cross-platform solutions that increase the competition in the sector - vide AMD. Which is not to say that the move AMD made is a bad thing - it's just hardly surprising under current circumstances.
witek report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3