Senin, 25 Juni 2012

AMD Announces Code XL at AFDS 2012


We have been arguing for a software strategy from AMD for years now. AMD needs to build its own compiler just like Intel has, but the financial resources for such an endeavor have always been unattainable for AMD.

Knowing that building a compiler requires years of work and billions of dollars, we’ve argued for optimization and debug tools along with a few applications that best demonstrate AMD’s hardware capabilities and advantages.

Even unofficially, providing a “hacked” (to be read 'modified version of Intel’s C compiler') would have done AMD a lot of good by removing Intel’s “sabotaging” compiler instructions and have the compiler treat CPUs by the functional units and capabilities inside, and not by the manufacturer name.

At AFDS 2012, AMD reportedly presented Code XL. This is a unified debugging and profiling tool for heterogeneous applications.

Practically, Code XL unifies all AMD’s GPU compute tools and AMD’s CPU optimization tools to enable faster and better development of OpenCL and GPU accelerated applications along with specific AMD CPU optimizations.

AMD's AFDS Code XL Presentation
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We’re glad AMD is doing so much work for APU / GPU / OpenCL optimization, but we’re hoping the company won’t forget about the importance of CPU optimizations, as correct identification and use of FMA3 and FMA4 along with many other Piledriver units can provide a considerable increase in performance.

AMD’s Code XL will come to the developer in three different versions.

One is a Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 plug-in or add-on.

The other will be a standalone Windows application, while the last is a Linux version that AMD promises will have all the options and features of the Windows version.

AMD demonstrated again what can be achieved with OpenCL and iGPU optimization with WinZIP’s latest version, but there’s a strange occurrence there, as the performance increase is exactly the same no matter how many VLIW cores the APU has.

If you have any explanation for WinZIP’s peculiar performance results using the latest OpenCL optimizations, feel free to drop us a comment.

Via: AMD Announces Code XL at AFDS 2012

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