Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices has furthered its objective of merging CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU) programming by creating a unified software development kit for development across its ATI accelerator product lines.
AMD today announced ATI catalyst driver packages that let specialized “stream computing” applications offload tasks onto the GPU in an effort to accelerate system performance. The drivers integrate with AMD’s compute abstraction layer, which enables programming in high-level languages rather than GPU-specific graphics programming.
That integration gives material form to AMD’s Fusion branding—the concept that AMD processing implicitly includes both “traditional, x86-64 [processing] and data-parallel [GPU], accelerated processing,” noted Richard Walsh, an IDC research director.
