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:Who would be the target customers?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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