Slowly but surely, GPU acceleration is becoming an important part of every day computing tasks, from rendering in PowerPoint 2010 to transcoding videos and accelerating page composition in a browser. And now that increasingly powerful graphics cores are being integrated into mainstream processors - from both AMD and Intel - more and more people will have access to the power of heterogeneous processing.
To help developers make the most of this, AMD has just released a software development kit (SDK) that will let programmers leverage the power of the GPU nestled inside the recently released Fusion APUs. The new Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK 2.3 - the successor to the ATI Stream SDK - is designed to let devs take advantage of the power of the latest multi-core CPUs, DirectX 11-capable GPUs and heterogeneous processors like those in AMD's Brazos platform.
This version of APP also introduces support for the recently released Radeon HD 6900-series GPUs and OpenCL 1.1. The existing OpenCL support has been tweaked as well, improving both the runtime performance and the maths libraries.
John Taylor, AMD's director of Client Product and Software Marketing, said that, "when developers harness the power of parallel processing within our APU designs, they can fundamentally change the PC experience to help not only make it faster, but also to create new possibilities in software".
In addition, the company took the opportunity to announce a new Fusion Developer Summit. The event will be help for the first time this June in Bellevue, Washington and will bring together developers and researchers to allow them to share thoughts on programming for heterogeneous AMD platforms.
More information - as well as the links to download the SDK - is available on AMD's APP page.
