We still aren't seeing the modern-day GPU utilised for everyday tasks as much as we'd like, but it isn't due to a lack of trying.
Following the introduction of a fourth beta release back in October, AMD has now made available the first production release of the ATI Stream SDK.
Version 2.0, available from developer.amd.com, offers full support for the Khronos Group's Open Computing Language (OpenCL 1.0) and hopes to encourage developers to harness the power of the GPU in everyday applications.
In addition to being the first production release to offer Open CL 1.0 support, the latest Stream SDK introduces a handful of new features - including support for atomic functions for 32-bit integers and a Visual Studio 2008-integrated performance analysis tool.
Features new to v2.0 are described by AMD as follows:
- First production release of ATI Stream SDK with OpenCL™ 1.0 support.
- New: Support for OpenCL™ ICD (Installable Client Driver).
- New: Support for atomic functions for 32-bit integers.
- New: Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008-integrated ATI Stream Profiler performance analysis tool.
- Preview: Support for OpenCL™ / OpenGL® interoperability.
- Preview: Support for OpenCL™ / Microsoft® DirectX® 10 interoperability.
- Preview: Support for double-precision floating point basic arithmetic in OpenCL™ C kernels.
- Updated OpenCL™ runtime to conditionally load ATI CAL runtime libraries to allow execution on compatible CPUs without ATI Catalyst™ installed.
- Updated OpenCL™ runtime to allow simultaneous use of OpenCL™ and ATI CAL APIs in a single user application.
- Updated cl.hpp from the Khronos OpenCL working group release.
- Various OpenCL™ compiler and runtime fixes and enhancements.
