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AMD Open Sources the AMD Performance Library

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-my-library-go dept.

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."

2 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is this that silly.. by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Microcode for beginners... FYI by killmofasta · · Score: 5, Informative

    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