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

Posted by timothy on from the now-that's-something-like dept.

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."

4 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. The real benefit by HappySqurriel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  2. Re:Optimization by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  3. Re:Optimization by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Not any time soon by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.