AMD Debuts New SDK, Tools and Libraries, for Heterogeneous Computing Developers

AMD started 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.