Microsoft Demos C++ AMP At AMD Developers Summit

MojoKid writes "The second day of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit began with a keynote from Microsoft's Herb Sutter, Principal Architect, Native Languages and resident C++ guru. The gist of Herb's talk centered around heterogeneous computing and the changes coming with future versions of Visual Studio and C++. One of the main highlights of the talk was a demo of a C++ AMP application that seamlessly took advantage of all of the compute resources within a few of the various demo systems, from workstations to netbooks. The physics demo seamlessly switched from using CPU, integrated GPU, and discrete GPU resources, showcasing the performance capabilities of each. As additional bodies are added, workload increases with a ramp-up to over 600 of GFLops in compute performance."

Comments

AMP?

[c0lo]

Gosh, I came hate this acronymia that so endemic in IT.

In this context, AMP doesn't stand for amplifier, Adenosine monophosphate or Ampere, but for "Accelerated Massive Parallelism". Seems like a microsoftism for the more traditional term of "Massive Parallel Processing"

Re:AMP?

[Alex Belits]

Microsoft has a history of inventing names and acronyms that collide with established terms in unrelated areas. I suspect, they are trying to get potential users to see a new name as something they have heard but know nothing about its actual meaning, so term looks "established" in those people's eyes.

For example, ".Net".

Re:AMP?

[phantomfive]

The worst part is when Microsofties try to get you to accept the term as something real, and that it makes Microsoft better. Example:

Microsoftie: isn't Microsoft great? They have managed code and no one else does.
Me: Isn't Java the same?
Microsoftie: No, that's a virtual machine, that's different!
Me: ..........

Re:AMP?

[Joce640k]

How hard is it to write "AMP (Accelerated Massive Parallelism)" in a summary?

Re:Who would be the target customers?

[kelemvor4]

Them and pretty much anyone who writes c++ code and wants their software to run faster. I suppose if you're interested in having your software run slower, this may not be for you.

Normally I would say that too

[symbolset]

This is key innovation. It looks like an important new step we've needed for a long time. It looks like they have done well with it.

Of course it should be inspected for traps. From these folks there are always traps. But this particular time I think this is important enough that we look closely at it to see if there isn't something useful we can safely extract, while being mindful for the traps.

I've been here a long time. I've posted nearly 5,000 comments here over 8 years. Never once before have I said this about a Microsoft technology: This deserves a look.

Re:Who would be the target customers?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, assuming your code has embarrassingly parallel components. Otherwise, it's pretty useless.

Re:Yet another attempt at vendor lock-in.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don t think there are open affords which are attempting to do this by extending C++ compiler.

Open affords(clearly exclude CUDA) are usually inventing a new language (usually a subset of C). With much restricted language features, and is loosely integrated with host code.

I think they are the first and they are doing the right things here.
It is nice to have the host code tightly integrated to the GPU code, and with most of the useful C++ language features there.