AMD Announces New Unified SDK, Tools and Accelerated Libraries for Heterogeneous Computing Developers

APU13 ser­ves as launch plat­form for new deve­lo­per tools and sheds light on upco­ming third gene­ra­ti­on APU, “Kaveri”



SUNNYVALE, Calif. —11/11/2013 

AMD (NYSE: AMD) kicked off its 2013 Deve­lo­per Sum­mit (APU13) today, announ­cing a new uni­fied Soft­ware Deve­lo­p­ment Kit (SDK,) an impro­ved CodeXL tool suite with added fea­tures and sup­port for the latest AMD hard­ware, and added hete­ro­ge­neous acce­le­ra­ti­on in popu­lar Open Source libra­ri­es. Tog­e­ther, the­se tools pro­vi­de a sub­stan­ti­al step for­ward in pro­duc­ti­vi­ty and ease-of-use for deve­lo­pers wis­hing to harness the full power of modern hete­ro­ge­neous plat­forms span­ning form ser­vers to PCs to hand­held devices.

Deve­lo­pers are essen­ti­al to our mis­si­on of rea­li­zing the full poten­ti­al of modern com­pu­ting tech­no­lo­gies,” said Man­ju Heg­de, cor­po­ra­te vice pre­si­dent, Hete­ro­ge­neous Solu­ti­ons, AMD. “Enri­ching the deve­lo­per expe­ri­ence by harnes­sing the­se tech­no­lo­gies is a cri­ti­cal part of AMD’s mis­si­on to acce­le­ra­te deve­lo­per adoption.”

To achie­ve this com­mon mis­si­on, AMD is announ­cing impro­ve­ments across four fronts:

  • The uni­fied SDK includes AMD APP SDK 2.9 and is the most user-fri­end­ly hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting SDK yet. It pro­vi­des impro­ved ease-of-use and deve­lo­per pro­duc­ti­vi­ty by adding seve­ral new capa­bi­li­ties. This is AMD’s first step toward pro­vi­ding deve­lo­pers with simp­le access to all the pro­gramma­ble com­pon­ents of the company’s pro­ducts. Some of the sali­ent fea­tures are: a Web-based sam­ple brow­ser that makes it easy to find the right samples for a pro­ject; added sup­port for CMake – a popu­lar make uti­li­ty; impro­ved Open­CL™ source editing with a plug-in to visu­al stu­dio; and the addi­ti­on of seve­ral new samples high­light­ing use of opti­mi­zed open source libra­ri­es (Open­CV, Bolt) to get acce­le­ra­ti­on with mini­mal effort.
  • The uni­fied SDK also includes the Media SDK v1.0 beta release. This will be AMD’s first public release of the Media SDK, which enables deve­lo­pers to levera­ge AMD’s uni­que and dif­fe­ren­tia­ted mul­ti­me­dia capa­bi­li­ties. Some of the key fea­tures of the Media SDK are a GPU-acce­le­ra­ted video pre/post pro­ces­sing libra­ry and a libra­ry for low laten­cy video encoding.
  • The uni­fied SDK also pro­mo­tes new hete­ro­ge­neous acce­le­ra­ti­on opti­miza­ti­ons in seve­ral open source libra­ri­es with the goal of making it simp­le for deve­lo­pers to acce­le­ra­te appli­ca­ti­ons. The­se include:  Open­CV (most popu­lar com­pu­ter visi­on libra­ry) now with many Open­CL  acce­le­ra­ted func­tions; clMath with acce­le­ra­ted BLAS and FFT libra­ri­es acces­si­ble from For­tran, C and C++; and Bolt, a C++ tem­p­la­te libra­ry pro­vi­ding GPU off-load for com­mon data-par­al­lel algo­rith­ms, now with cross-OS sup­port as well as per­for­mance impro­ve­ments and new functionality.
  • The latest CodeXL tools suite (ver­si­on 1.3,) AMD’s com­pre­hen­si­ve hete­ro­ge­neous deve­lo­per tool offe­ring, now sup­ports Java, the world’s most popu­lar pro­gramming lan­guage. To fur­ther AMD’s efforts to pro­vi­de the best inte­gra­ted tool suite, AMD has incor­po­ra­ted sta­tic ker­nel ana­ly­sis capa­bi­li­ties. Also included in this release are added sup­port for remo­te debugging/profiling to enable ser­ver and embedded cus­to­mers as well as sup­port for the latest GPU pro­ducts from AMD (GCN-based dis­crete GPUs and APUs.)

AMD con­ti­nues to deli­ver excel­lent hete­ro­ge­neous pro­gramming deve­lo­per tools for Open­CL™ – the indus­try stan­dard for hete­ro­ge­neous pro­gramming,” said Bill Richard, vice pre­si­dent of Soft­ware Deve­lo­p­ment at Win­zip. “AMD’s tools have been instru­men­tal in our efforts to deli­ver signi­fi­cant appli­ca­ti­on per­for­mance impro­ve­ments to our customers.”

The­se new pro­duct releases repre­sent ano­ther step for­ward toward AMD’s goals of sup­port­ing cross-plat­form solu­ti­ons (across OSes and ven­dors,) mul­ti­ple pro­gramming lan­guages and con­tin­ued con­tri­bu­ti­ons to the Open Source com­mu­ni­ty. This is part of AMD’s ongo­ing com­mit­ment to make hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­ting per­va­si­ve and mainstream.

AMD also announ­ced today at APU13 details about “Kaveri,” the third gene­ra­ti­on per­for­mance APU from AMD, during a key­note deli­ver­ed by Dr. Lisa Su, seni­or vice pre­si­dent and gene­ral mana­ger, Glo­bal Busi­ness Units, AMD.

Kaveri” is the first APU with HSA fea­tures, AMD TrueAu­dio tech­no­lo­gy and AMD’s Man­t­le API com­bi­ning to bring the next level of gra­phics, com­pu­te and effi­ci­en­cy to desk­tops (FM2+), note­books, embedded APUs and ser­vers.  FM2+ ship­ments to cus­to­mers are sla­ted to begin in late 2013 with initi­al avai­la­bi­li­ty in cus­to­mer desk­top offe­rings sche­du­led for Jan. 14, 2014. Fur­ther details will be announ­ced at CES 2014.

In addi­ti­on to the “Kaveri” announce­ment, Dr. Su high­ligh­ted AMD’s lea­der­ship in APU tech­no­lo­gy and hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­te capa­bi­li­ties, and dis­cus­sed the deve­lo­per-cen­tric future of AMD tech­no­lo­gy. With gra­phics, gam­ing, per­for­mance mobi­le cli­ents and embedded devices gro­wing in pre­va­lence, AMD is at the epi­cen­ter of this con­ver­gence, and is equip­ped with the neces­sa­ry IP to exe­cu­te on this oppor­tu­ni­ty for our cus­to­mers. To enable the­se gro­wing eco­sys­tems, Dr. Su made com­mit­ments to con­ti­nue sup­port­ing pro­gramming tools and plat­forms like Hete­ro­ge­neous Sys­tem Archi­tec­tu­re (HSA), Man­t­le, Open­CL, C++ AMP and Micro­soft DirectX® that are important to appli­ca­ti­on and game developers.

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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.