Did you know that AMD offers a free application called AMD SimNow™ that actually simulates future AMD platforms?  This video features Juan Flores, MTS Design Engineer, talking about what SimNow is and who could benefit from using it, then gives examples of the type of instructions available in AMD SimNow that aren’t available in current silicon, like AVX and XOP.  (Video Length 12:43)

In addition to the much anticipated  OpenCL™ 1.1 support, this release of ATI Stream SDK expands the base of operating systems, processors and compilers that are supported, making ATI Stream technology even more accessible than before. Other highly demanded features have been added to this release, such as single-channel OpenCL™ image format support and quite a few additional double-precision floating point routines for OpenCL™ C kernels.
OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

ATI Stream Profiler is a Microsoft® Visual Studio® integrated runtime profiler that gathers performance data from the GPU as your OpenCL™ application runs.  Version 1.4 features support for OpenCL™ 1.1 and ATI Stream SDK v2.2, command line interface support, and more.

Stream KernelAnalyzer is a tool for analyzing the performance of OpenCL™, Brook+ and IL kernels for ATI Radeon™ graphics cards.  This latest release adds support for OpenCL™ binary format, Catalyst™ driver 10.4-10.7, and ATI Stream SDK v2.2.

Michael Chu, product manager for ATI Stream computing software at AMD, offers insight into the inner workings of the OpenCL working group and how its tiered extension mechanism makes this open standard more nimble and extendable.  With nearly 30 companies and institutions contributing to OpenCL, this adaptability helps keep the specification moving forward.

The Khronos Group developed OpenGL ES 2.0 to help bring modern graphics capabilities to mobile platforms.  This API has been adopted by many embedded devices such as consoles, mobile phones, handheld computers, and vehicles.  AMD has just announced support for OpenGL ES on desktop platforms. This means ATI Radeon™, ATI Mobility Radeon™, ATI FirePro™ and ATI FireGL™ graphics cards released since 2008 will run OpenGL ES 2.0 natively. No longer do embedded developers need to exclusively use emulators or translation layers to get OpenGL ES 2.0 code up and running.

3DNow! is an instruction set that AMD introduced over 10 years ago.  While these instructions were innovative for the times, newer technologies have replaced them.  Therefore, the instructions are being deprecated.  This might have an impact on your application if you didn’t check the feature bits before executing the program.  Read this blog to learn more.

• VMWorld
  August 30 – September 2: San Francisco, California
• Oracle OpenWorld
  September 19-23: San Francisco, California
• VMWorld Europe
  October 11-14:  Copenhagen, Denmark