AMD's OpenCL Allows GPU Code To Run On X86 CPUs

eldavojohn writes "Two blog posts from AMD are causing a stir in the GPU community. AMD has created and released the industry's first OpenCL which allows developers to code against AMD's graphics API (normally only used for their GPUs) and run it on any x86 CPU. Now, as a developer, you can divide the workload between the two as you see fit instead of having to commit to either GPU or CPU. Ars has more details."

Comments

The real benefit

[HappySqurriel]

Wouldn't the real benefit be that you wouldn't have to create two separate code-bases to create an application that both supported GPU optimization and could run naively on any system?

Re:Optimization

[Timothy Brownawell]

So now programmers can write code that will work on either processor and will be optimized on neither. Brilliant. I'm sure this is somehow a great step forward.

-sigh-

Um, what? How does the existence of a compiler that generates x86 code prevent the existence of an optimizing compiler that generate GPU instructions?

Re:Optimization

[olsmeister]

Welcome back to the days of the math coprocessor....

Re:GPUs are dying - the cycle continues

[Pentium100]

A dedicated graphics processor will be faster than a general purpose processor. Yes, you could use an 8 core CPU for graphics, or you could use a 4 year old VGA. Guess which one is cheaper.

Re:GPUs are dying - the cycle continues

[Khyber]

Hey, my nVidia 9800GTX+ has over 120 processing cores of one form or another in one package..

Show me an Intel offering or AMD offering in the CPU market with similar numbers of cores in one package.

Re:Nice

[Briareos]

I suppose I could have been clearer. I'm talking about gpu decoding of HD video, conspicuously absent on AMD drivers in Linux, fully functional on NVIDIA.

Fixed that for you. Or does installing Linux somehow magically unsolder the video decoding part of AMD's GPUs?

np: Death Cab For Cutie - Information Travels Faster (The Photo Album)

Not any time soon

[Sycraft-fu]

I agree that the eventual goal is everything on the CPU. After all, that is the great thing about a computer. You do everything in software, you don't need dedicated devices for each feature, you just need software. However, even as powerful as CPUs are, they are WAY behind what is needed to get the kind of graphics we do out of a GPU. At this point in time, dedicated hardware is still far ahead of what you can do with a CPU. So it is coming, but probably not for 10+ years.

Re:Intel counters with CPU+GPU on a chip

[avandesande]

Microsoft wouldn't allow licensing dual cores on netbooks.

Re:Isn't there a fundamental problem...

[Chris Burke]

I admit I am not their target audeince, and I can see how OpenAL is sufficient for videogame developers, but it really is nothing more than sufficient, and unlike OpenGL, which universal enough that it can be used in system and productivity software, on computers, phones, and in renderfarms on everything from calendar software to animated movies, OpenAL is strictly for videogames only.

Um, yeah. I have only used it sparingly, but it has always been my understanding that OpenAL was a library for doing spatial audio, in particular for 3D games. I never got the impression that it was supposed to just be an arbitrary audio api. I never got the impression that it was supposed to be for anyone who wasn't specifically interested in spatial audio.

I mean there are plenty of other cross-platform sound libraries.

Is OpenAL seriously advertising itself as a general-purpose sound library akin to OpenGL these days? Is it suffering from feature/scope creep? Or is this just a case of picking the wrong tool for the job based on an understandable confusion regarding the OpenFoo nomenclature?