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AMD Open Sources the AMD Performance Library
bluephone writes "Today AMD announced that they're now opening the source to the AMD Performance Library (APL) under the Apache license. The newly opened code is now hosted at SourceForge (the corporate overlord of Slashdot) under its new name, Framewave. Phoronix says, "The AMD Performance Library / Framewave covers a multitude of operations from simple math operations to media processing and optimizations for multi-core environments." No word as to if it does your laundry. The SourceForge page says that while Framewave is 'sponsored' by AMD, it is "very much an open-source venture. While AMD will continue to participate in and contribute to the project, third-party developers are welcome and encouraged to implement all or part of the code base and/or to create derivative works." Being Apache licensed, it's quite open, so this doesn't seem to be mere lip service."
No. If you look, you'll see that H.264 video decoding is one of the included features of the libraries. I expect to see encoding added in the future.
Eh. When I get mod points I am usually hesiant to mod outside my field of expertise and REALLY hesitant to mod up/down in an older story of about 100-200 posts. Who knows if a comment I modded insightful appears 1/2 dozen times a few inches below? I try to stick with newer stories and pick reasonably good comments that won't get +5 eventually, because those are going to get modded anyways.
Look up what microcode is. Microcode updates typically need to be reapplied every time the cpu is reset, ie. every time you boot your system. On windows, it is obviously easiest to apply these updates using a driver that gets loaded on boot.
These microcode updates are used to fix bugs in the original hard-coded microcode. Being able to update the microcode is a great feature, because it often means you get a bug fix without actually replacing the physical cpu.
Yes they are. Modern CPUs have microcode (think firmware) which can even be replaced at runtime to patch bugs (e.g. race conditions that fudge memory protection). Intel and AMD both release microcode updates for their CPUs, and in Linux in particular, you can replace the microcode at runtime with zero risk because it's reset again when the CPU powers off.
A processor "driver" would support non-standard features like non-ACPI advanced power management, runtime tuning, the aforementioned microcode update, and so on. For instance, AMD's driver interfaces with their "Cool'N'Quiet" power scaling system (Linux has a driver built into the kernel so you generally don't need to care, but in Windows you have to install it manually).
Sam ty sig.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Actually NOT. That is not how dynamic recompliation works.
CISC instructions, that are not fully implemented in microcode, get dynamically recomplied into other intructions. Microcode is HOW those instructions get implemented.
Also: Jump/Load/Store instructions do go through microcode. All memory accesses do. It makes things faster and simpler.
Microcode is HOW CPU instructions get implemented. ADD is implemented in microcode, becuase it has to interface the data queues with the ALU.
The way Intel Does it, is that The microcode gets copied from a disk file, and then gets loaded into a special place on the CPU, that stores bug-fixed instructions. ROM does not contain microinstruction fixes, except on Intel Boards. (It does not get updated often enough.)
The CPU driver handles Multiple CPUs. ( Its called the HAL ). Cool and Quiet/ACPI is also handled here.
Refrence: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234558
and
Refrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode.
I cannot believe that I brough this up, and only got a 1, while others, in just adding a tiny explaination get a 4 or 5. PickyWicky
This is old news. My submission "APL under APL" was rejected...