​AMD (NYSE: AMD) in col­la­bo­ra­ti­on with Micro­soft® (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announ­ced the release of C++ AMP ver­si­on 1.2 – an open source C++ com­pi­ler which imple­ments ver­si­on 1.2 of the open spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­on for C++ AMP, available on both Linux and Win­dows for the first time. The release repres­ents ano­ther step for­ward toward AMD’s goal of sup­port­ing cross-plat­form solu­ti­ons, mul­ti­ple pro­gramming lan­guages and con­tin­ued con­tri­bu­ti­ons to the open source com­mu­ni­ty. The tool, which lever­a­ges Clang and LLVM, acce­le­ra­tes pro­duc­ti­vi­ty and ease of use for deve­lo­pers wis­hing to harness the full power of modern hete­ro­ge­neous plat­forms span­ning ser­vers, PCs and hand­held devices.

“AMD has a con­sis­tent track record of enri­ching the deve­lo­per expe­ri­ence, and we’re proud to make the first open source imple­men­ta­ti­on of C++ AMP available to enable grea­ter per­for­mance and more power-effi­ci­ent appli­ca­ti­ons,” said Man­ju Heg­de, cor­po­ra­te vice pre­si­dent, Hete­ro­ge­neous Appli­ca­ti­ons and Solu­ti­ons, AMD. “The cross-plat­form release is ano­ther step in streng­thening AMD’s deve­lo­per solu­ti­ons, allo­wing for increased pro­duc­ti­vi­ty and acce­le­ra­ted appli­ca­ti­ons through shared phy­si­cal memo­ry across the CPU and GPU on both Linux and Windows.”

“AMD con­ti­nues to deli­ver excel­lent deve­lo­per tools for hete­ro­ge­neous pro­gramming. Part­ne­ring with AMD to deli­ver C++ AMP to the Linux and Open Source com­mu­ni­ties was a natu­ral step for Micro­soft as we work to impro­ve the per­for­mance and deve­lo­per expe­ri­ence on modern com­pu­ting plat­forms,” said S. Soma­se­gar, cor­po­ra­te vice pre­si­dent of the Deve­lo­per Divi­si­on at Microsoft.

C++ AMP ver­si­on 1.2 enables C++ deve­lo­pers to acce­le­ra­te appli­ca­ti­ons across a broad set of hard­ware and soft­ware con­fi­gu­ra­ti­ons by sup­port­ing three outputs:

• Khro­nos Group Open­CL¹, sup­port­ing AMD CPU/APU/GPU, Intel CPU/APU, NVIDIA GPU, Apple Mac OS X and other Open­CL com­pli­ant platforms;
• Khro­nos Group SPIR, sup­port­ing AMD CPU/APU/GPU, Intel CPU/APU and future SPIR com­pli­ant plat­forms; and
• HSA Foun­da­ti­on HSAIL, sup­port­ing AMD APU and future HSA com­pli­ant platforms.

A key per­for­mance fea­ture of ver­si­on 1.2 of the open source C++ AMP spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­on is sup­port for shared phy­si­cal memo­ry, which great­ly sim­pli­fies sha­ring of data bet­ween the CPU and GPU on hete­ro­ge­neous plat­forms. Hete­ro­ge­neous plat­forms built on the new spec allow pro­gramm­ers to bene­fit from mini­mi­zed over­head of expen­si­ve data copies and poin­ter updates when acce­le­ra­ting applications.

Supporting Resources

• Access latest C++ AMP com­pi­ler source code here
• View the Open C++ AMP spe­ci­fi­ca­ti­on ver­si­on 1.2 here
• For more infor­ma­ti­on about Clang and LLVM, visit their web­site. Beco­me a fan of AMD on Face­book

About AMD

AMD (NYSE: AMD) designs and inte­gra­tes tech­no­lo­gy that powers mil­li­ons of intel­li­gent devices, inclu­ding per­so­nal com­pu­ters, tablets, game con­so­les and cloud ser­vers that defi­ne the new era of sur­round com­pu­ting. AMD solu­ti­ons enable peo­p­le ever­y­whe­re to rea­li­ze the full poten­ti­al of their favo­ri­te devices and appli­ca­ti­ons to push the boun­da­ries of what is pos­si­ble. For more infor­ma­ti­on, visit www.amd.com.