AMD announces availability of APP s/w kit

SUNNYVALE, USA : Chipmaker AMD recently announced the availability of the AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Software Development Kit (SDK) v2.5.

The latest version of the APP SDK provides developers a solid foundation to take full advantage of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), including the latest AMD A-Series APUs offering brilliant HD graphics, supercomputer-like performance and All-Day battery life, said a press release.

It helps developers quickly and easily tap into the power of GPU compute and parallel processing in heterogeneous computing platforms, building on the OpenCL industry standard to help developers reach a broader market by writing applications that run on a variety of device form factors.

The updated AMD APP SDK v2.5 delivers a key performance enhancement that reduces CPU to GPU bandwidth limitations, achieving effective data transfer rates as high as 15GB per second with the latest AMD A-Series APUs.

In addition to raw performance, AMD A-Series APUs also enable advanced capabilities that can greatly enhance the computing experience such as gestural interfaces, multi-monitor support, 3D entertainment and real-time image stabilization.

"Improving performance and programmability on AMD platforms is a key initiative for us, and we work closely with developers to help us make the APU the best possible development platform," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program.

He added that these latest SDK refinements, they are supporting continued growth of the ecosystem and building on the momentum generated by the successful AMD Fusion Developer Summit held in June of this year.

Other features of the AMD APP SDK v2.5 include enhancements to the OpenCL runtime designed to enable more efficient use of available GPU compute capabilities by reducing kernel launch times and PCIe transfer overheads.

In addition, the AMD APP SDK provides broad multi-GPU support on Windows platforms including support for APU plus discrete GPU that enables compute performance scaling across multiple GPUs, as well as AMD PowerXpress(TM) technology support for APU plus discrete GPU.

The AMD APP SDK is being used by developers who have entered the AMD OpenCL Coding Competition, being run by software development leader TopCoder, the release added.