If you thought today was only going to be about AMD CPUs, the company has a streaming surprise for you. Up until now, it was pretty quiet about the strategy, but by this time next month, Stream will be everywhere. The big bang is that Stream consists of three major parts, the GPU, the Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL), and tools. You know about the GPU, and tools are just that, tools for writing code, not really end user focused. The big one is the CAL.Normally, with something as esoteric as GPGPU, you need to download drivers, patches and software, followed by an afternoon of tuning. It puts the technology in the proverbial geek ghetto, not something for the faint of heart, much less Dell/HP/etc owners.
AMD is doing something brilliant here, with the release of Catalyst 8.12 in early December, AMD is going to roll the CAL into the mainstream consumer driver. When you get the graphics drivers, you get GPGPU functionality for free, no download, no install... it just works. What good is that without software, though? Not much, so that is being addressed as well. AMD defines GPGPU as just about everything not traditionally seen as a GPU task. This means anything other than 3D and video playback is GPGPU. Video encoding, game physics, and science are all classic examples, but you can't help thinking that the killer app is still in someone's basement, being built line by line evenings and weekends.
AMD has all of this, but they aren't being abjectly stupid about it like Nvidia. Over at the other green team, even the cafeteria food has a CUDA tag on it. Trust me, chocolate cake doesn't need to be made with CUDA, and there are some things that even bacon can't make better. AMD is putting things out, Nvidia is banging a drum, take your pick. ( www.atomicmpc.com.au )
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