ATI Stream Finally Launched To Combat Cuda

[Hooch Tan]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-stream-gpgpu,2335.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...gpgpu,2335.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1245353592.usr20447.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>It took nearly two years for AMD to come out with a response to NVidia's CUDA platform and even at that, when ATI Stream was first released it was severely limited.&nbsp; AMD has finally released an update that puts ATI Stream much more in line with the competition.&nbsp; Toms Hardware takes the update for a spin and finds that there are still a few parts that need polishing.&nbsp; It's great to see GPUs getting more use since their parallel processing capabilities are astounding, CUDA still seems to have a considerable edge for varying applications which along with video and image processing can also do things such as PhysX.</p>

[Jason Dunn]

All this CUDA/STREAM stuff is all well and good, but essentially useless until it's adopted by Adobe, Pinnacle, Sony, Apple, etc...the people that make the video editing software that most of the world uses. Right now all of the video editing software that can use GPU acceleration is stand-alone stuff - as in, software that's not capable of being used for complex projects. The first major video editing software package to incorporate GPU acceleration is going to win some huge points!

[electrollama]

On the Apple side of things, Apple is introducing OpenCL in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. As far as I can tell, this is a wrapper around CUDA/Stream/Whatever Intel uses that gives developers a uniform library to create code that will run on the GPU.

I think this will spur development as you won't have to choose between NVIDIA or ATI support or doubling your work.

Anyone know if Microsoft has plans to incorporate OpenCL or roll their own like they did with DirectX/OpenGL.

[Jason Dunn]

I think this will spur development as you won't have to choose between NVIDIA or ATI support or doubling your work.

Indeed - the fact that developers have had to chose which GPU to support is a huge problem. NVIDIA and ATI should have known better. Hopefully OpenCL will pick up steam and become the de facto standard.