AMD plans big with its Stream project. Under the Stream project, the graphics cores will be able to perform tasks usually performed by CPU and called this process as General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Unit. Thousands of graphics processing cores packed on graphics card's processor can be leveraged to perform generic calculations such as scientific imaging when used on more affordable computing systems.
AMD's Stream project directly competes with Nvidia's CUDA platform.
Patricia Harrell, AMD Stream computing director, said that AMD hopes to offer a complete open platform for software developers to optimize codes for CPU and GPU. AMD has announced open ATI Stream Software Development Kit v1.3 to leverage developers, tech professionals and research professionals for high-performance computing on affordable computing systems.
Using ATI Stream SDK, developers are expected to easily develop ATI Stream-enabled applications that would be used over AMD graphics hardware like AMD graphics hardware, including AMD FireStream 9250 and AMD FireStream 9270 compute accelerators, ATI FirePro V5700 and ATI FirePro V8700 workstation graphics accelerators, and ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards.
AMD has also announced to release ATI Catalyst driver v8.12 for ATI Radeon graphics cards on December 10. As per AMD, this new ATI Catalyst driver will instantly unlock ATI Stream Acceleration capabilities on ATI graphics cards. AMD has also partnered with Aprius for building 8-GPU based stream computing servers as a straight blow to Nvidia's Tesla range.
With these Stream applications, general computing tasks such as video rendering can be given slight boost of performance and even everyday tasks like opening large image files in couple of seconds.
With range of free and open software for Stream project, AMD aims to open up more possibilities for their vision of GPGPU and Fusion in long run.
Source: PC Authority
