CUDA Toolkit and SDK 2.3 betas available to registered developers

[Stefan]

The CUDA Toolkit and SDK 2.3 betas are now available to registered developers. They include the following features:

    * The CUFFT Library now supports double-precision transforms and includes significant performance improvements for single-precision transforms as well. See the CUDA Toolkit release notes for details.
    * The CUDA-GDB hardware debugger is now available for all supported Linux platforms and is included in the CUDA Toolkit installer.
    * GPUs in an SLI group are now enumerated individually, so you can achieve multi-GPU performance even when SLI is enabled for graphics.
    * New support for fp16 <-> conversion intrinsics allows storage of data in fp16 format with computation in fp32. Use of fp16 format is ideal for applications that require higher numerical range than 16-bit integer but less precision than fp32 and reduces memory space and bandwidth consumption.
    * The CUDA SDK has been updated to include:
          o A new pitchLinearTexure code sample that shows how to effeciently texture from pitch linear memory.
          o A new PTXJIT code sample illustrating how to use cuModuleLoadDataEx() to load PTX source from memory instead of loading a file.
          o Two new code samples for Windows, showing how to use the NVCUVID library to decode MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 content and pass frames to OpenGL or Direct3D for display.
          o Updated code samples showing how to properly align CUDA kernel function parameters so the same code works on both x32 and x64 systems.
    * The Visual Profiler (packaged separately) includes several enhancements:
          o All memory transfer API calls are now reported
          o Support for profiling multiple contexts per GPU.
          o Synchronized clocks for requested start time on the CPU and start/end times on the GPU for all kernel launches and memory transfers.
          o Global memory load and store efficiency metrics for GPUs with compute capability 1.2 and higher.
    * The CUDA Driver for MacOS is now packaged separately from the CUDA Toolkit.
    * Support for major Linux distros, MacOS X, and Windows:
          o Fedora 10, RHEL 4.7 & 5.3, SLED 10.2 & 11.0, OpenSUSE 11.1, and Ubuntu 8.10 & 9.04
          o Windows XP/Vista/7 with Visual Studio 8 (VC2005) and 9 (VC2008)
          o MacOS X 10.5.6 and later (32-bit)