Microsoft Demos C++ AMP At AMD Developers Summit 187
MojoKid writes "The second day of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit began with a keynote from Microsoft's Herb Sutter, Principal Architect, Native Languages and resident C++ guru. The gist of Herb's talk centered around heterogeneous computing and the changes coming with future versions of Visual Studio and C++. One of the main highlights of the talk was a demo of a C++ AMP application that seamlessly took advantage of all of the compute resources within a few of the various demo systems, from workstations to netbooks. The physics demo seamlessly switched from using CPU, integrated GPU, and discrete GPU resources, showcasing the performance capabilities of each. As additional bodies are added, workload increases with a ramp-up to over 600 of GFLops in compute performance."
Re:Grand Central Dispatch (Score:4, Informative)
The most relevant difference is that it automatically uses different types of compute resources for the same task, depending on what's available. Core Image can do some of that, but it's limited to graphics workloads.
So it's Grand Central Dispatch + Core Image + a bit.
Re:Microsoft C++ (Score:4, Informative)
That was back with MSVC++ 6.0 released in 1998 before the ISO C++ draft was fully ratified. MSVC++ today is one of the more standards compliant compilers, although their template instantiation mechanism is still somewhat broken so that it can still support their legacy MFC crap.
Re:This could push new hardware (Score:4, Informative)
[quote]But, a lot of older computers which don't have DirectX 11 graphic cards have to emulate the DirectX DirectCompute API on the CPU[/quote].
They don't really have to emulate anything, most of the kernel (as in "compute kernel") functions and operations in DirectCompute have a one-to-one mapping with most CPU's SIMD instruction sets, such as x86's SSE/AVX. The primary difference then is that on the CPU you have a lot less cores, and on the GPU you may have thousands of cores/streaming processors, but you have higher memory latencies and at best only a L1 & L2 cache.
So it's OpenCL then (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's really a lot more like OpenCL [apple.com].
Which is not Mac only BTW... but you can use it in OSX or IOS development.
Also Apple's Accelerate library (C library) takes advantage of OpenCL for BLAS and Linpack and so on...