AMD Developer Inside Track, Episode 2: OpenCL Introduction

[Stefan]

AMD has always been an advocate of open standards that build on and extend proven technologies (example: x86-64)W.  As such, it is a natural fit for AMD to embrace OpenCL as part of its ATI Stream offering.  But, just what is OpenCL?

In this month's episode of the AMD Developer Inside Track I interview Mike Houston, GPG System Architect.  He talks about what OpenCL is, what the transition to this new language will be like and he gets into what applications could benefit from OpenCL, as well as what the future has in store for software applications that use it.   

One of the advantages of OpenCL is its advanced queuing system which is great for game development. It is also designed to work very well with various graphics APIs such as OpenGL, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10.

Game developers aren't the only ones who can take advantage of OpenCL though.  According to Michael, it is going to be very useful for applications such as media encoding, virus scanning, and physics to name a few.  It makes a lot of sense for AMD to move to a ubiquitous computing language that runs on platforms everywhere.  The next few years will be an interesting time for GPGPU technology as several hardware and software vendors get on board.

ATI Stream technology is gaining significant momentum.  Some cool and unexpected examples of ATI Stream technology in action are:

    * Folding@home: http://folding.stanford.edu/
    * Milkyway@home: http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

An example of gaming technology and OpenCL:

    * Havoc demo: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/27/havok-and-amd-show-off-opencl-with-pretty-pretty-dresses/

Watch the AMD Developer Inside Track, Episode 2 for the full story.