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ATI Stream SDK now supports GPU-accelerated OpenCL
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 14th October 2009
The latest beta of the ATI Stream SDK - Beta 4 - finally brings full support for the OpenCL GPGPU standard.
The latest release - Beta 4 - introduces the first true support for the OpenCL GPU offload engine, and according to AMD has been "certified fully compliant with OpenCL 1.0 by the Khronos Group," the standards body behind OpenCL.
The beta is available for immediate download from AMD's website, and allows programmers to implement OpenCL - which offloads highly parallelised tasks on to the graphics chipset, freeing up the system CPU - on a range of cards from the ATI Radeon HD 4350 at the bottom end right up to the latest ATI Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 cards.
Laptop users aren't left out in the cold either: this release of the Stream SDK will also work with ATI Mobility Radeon HD cards, from the 4300 series up to the 4870. High-end workstations are catered for with support for AMD's professional-grade ATI FirePro and AMD FireStream cards, too. However, all cards require that the host CPU supports SSE 3.x or later - something which shouldn't be too much of a challenge for any modern system.
AMD's software product manager Terry Makedon states that this first fully OpenCL-compliant release represents "an OpenCL platform that enables developers to create applications that run the way they were meant to be run, on all the available processors in the system," and should go some way to repairing the disappointment felt by developers when the ATI Stream SDK Beta 2 didn't support GPUs.
Will you be playing with the latest Stream SDK Beta, or is GPU offload still just a toy for certain very specific computing tasks? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Will ATI and Nvidia play nice on my system and share the load?
Good question... but I doubt we'd get an honest answer from either company at the moment (they don't know effectively). The proof will be in the pudding.
so does this open up anything regarding folding@home?
cheers spunky
Potentially, but it's up to Stanford to create an OpenCL Folding client. That might happen now that both ATI and Nvidia have OpenCL drivers.
Why do people always think the proof will be in the pudding? I have reasons to believe that cheescake is a better source.
However, as we all know (thanks to BT), not all cheesecakes are created equal, so choice is very important here.
yes please!
Without data corruption? Yes please (Yes, i'm talking for the ATi drivers...)