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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."
Good on them. Now how about an API that allows me to run GPU code on the GPU? The day I can play 1080p mkvs from a netbook on AMD/ATI hardware is the day I'll quit buying nvidia.
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Why would anyone ever want to do something well when they can fail at several things?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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?
Ironically Intel announced that they are going to stop outsourcing their GPU's in Atom processors and include the gpu + cpu in one package, yet nobody knows what happened to the dual core Atom N270...
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?
Things have been slowly moving in this directly already, since game makers have not been using available cpu horsepower very effectively. A little z-buffer magic and there is no reason why the object space couldn't be separated into completely independent processing streams.
-Matt
Having a separate compiler that doesn't integrate cleanly with the rest of your toolchain (i.e. uses a different intermediate representation preventing cross-module optimisations between C code and OpenCL) and doesn't integrate with the driver stack is very boring.
Oh, and the press release appears to be a lie:
AMD is the first to deliver a beta release of an OpenCL software development platform for x86-based CPUs
Somewhat surprising, given that OS X 10.6 betas have included an OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs for several months prior to the date of the press release. Possibly they meant public beta.
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Welcome back to the days of the math coprocessor....
It's difficult to actually figure out what you are talking about here..from what I see this article is about writing code to the AMD stream framework and have it target X86 (or AMD GPUs).
If your concern is shipping object code to a card to be processed may end up being so time consuming that it would not be worth it. Then I'd say that most examples of this kind of processing I've seen are doing some specific highly scalable task (e.g. MD5 hashing, portions of h264 decode). So clearly you have to do a cost/benefit like you would with any type of parallelization. That said, the cost of shipping code to the card is pretty small. So I would expect any reasonably repetitive task would afford some improvement. You're probably more worried about how well the code can be parallelized rather than the transfer cost.
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.
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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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
For some games that'll be true, but I think it'll be a long time, if ever, before we see a CPU that can compete with a high end GPU especially as the bar gets higher and higher - e.g. physics simulation , ray tracing...
Note that a GPU core/thread processor is way simpler than a general purpose CPU core and so MANY more can be fit on a die. Compare an x86 chip with maybe 4 cores with something like an NVidea Tesla (CUDA) card which starts with 128 thread processors and goes up to 960(!) in a 1U format card! I think there'll always be that 10-100 factor more cores in a high end GPU vs CPU and for apps that need that degree of paralellism/power the CPU will not be a substitute.
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.
My main issues with OpenAL are that it is completely based around the concept of a "listener" interacting with sounds in "space." In other words, it's the OpenGL semantic applied to sound. I looked into it originally because I wanted something more system-independent than Apple's CoreAudio, but really OpenAL is just a videogame language, and it's focused completely around choreographing sounds for interactive emulation of space. OpenAL is hell if you want to apply a subjective effects aside from its pre-cooked spatial repertory, or even do something simple like build a mixer with busses.
In my line, film post-production, the users really don't want to control the "direction" and "distance" of a sound, they want to control the pan and reverb send of a sound; the language and the model is simply too high level for people who are used to setting their own EQ poles and their own pitch-shifts for doppler.... Most of the models OpenAL uses to create distance and direction sensations are pretty subjective, arbitrary, and not really based on current pychoacoustic modelling. It works to an extent, but it doesn't give a sound designer, of a videogame or anything else, the level of control over the environment they generally expect. It certainly doesn't give a videogame sound designer the level of control over presentation that OpenGL gives the modeller or shader developer.
Oh, and OpenAL doesn't support 96k, 24 bit audio, or 5.1 surround.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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?
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