There was some guy at Microsoft who understood IT very well while being a businessman: “Developers, developers, developers, developers!”. You saw it again in the mobile market and now with OpenCL. Normally I watch his yearly speech to see which product…
Support matrix of Compute SDKs
Multi-Core Processors and the SDKs The empty boxes tell IBM and ARM have a lot of influence. With NVIDIA’s current pace with introducing new products (hardware and CUDA), they could also take on ARM. The matrix is restricted to current better-known…
Disruptive Technologies
Steve Streeting tweeted a few weeks ago: “Remember, experts are always wrong about disruptive tech, because it disrupts what they’re experts in.”. I’m happy I evangelise and work with such a disruptive technology and it will take time until it is…
Waiting for Mobile OpenCL – Q1 2011
About 5 months ago we started waiting for Mobile OpenCL. Meanwhile we had all the news around ARM on CES in January, and of course all those beta-programs made progress meanwhile. And after a year of having “support“, we actually want…
SSEx, AVX, FMA and other extensions through OpenCL
This discussion is about a role OpenCL could play in a diversifying processor-market. Both AMD and Intel have added parallel instruction-sets for their CPUs to accelerate in media-operations. Each time a new instruction-set comes out, code needs to be recompiled to…
Gedit OpenCL Syntax Highlighting
Update 17-06-2011: updated version of opencl.lang and added opencl_host.lang. When learning a language it is nice to do it the hard way, so you take the default txt-file editor provided with your OS. No colours, not help, no nothing, pure hard-core learning….
ImageJ and OpenCL
For a customer I’m writing a plugin for ImageJ, a toolkit for image-processing and analysis in Java. Rick Lentz has written an OpenCL-plugin using JOCL. In the tutorial step 1 is installing the great OS Ubuntu, but that would not be…
OpenCL under Wine
The Wine 1.3 branch has support for OpenCL 1.0 since 1.3.9. Since Microsoft likes to get a little part of the Linux-dominated HPC-market, support for GPGPU is pretty good under the $799.00 costing Visual Studio – the free Express-version is not…
OpenCL mini buying guide for X86
Developing with OpenCL is fun, if you like debugging. Having software with support for OpenCL is even more fun, because no debugging is needed. But what would be a good machine? Below is an overview of what kind of hardware you…
Phoronix OpenCL Benchmark 3.0 beta
So you want OpenCL-benchmarks? Phoronix is a benchmark for OSX and Linux, created by Michael Larabel, Matthew Tippett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoronix_Test_Suite). On Ubuntu Phoronix version 2.8 is in the Ubuntu “app store” (Synaptic), but 3.0 has those nice OpenCL-tests. The tests are based…
Windows on ARM
In 2010 Microsoft got interested in ARM, because of low-power solutions for server-parks. ARM tried to lobby for years to convince Microsoft to port Windows to their architecture and now the result is there. Let’s not look to the past, why…
NVIDIA’s answer to SandyBridge and Fusion
Intel has Sandy Bridge, AMD has Fusion, now NVIDIA has a combination of CPU and GPU too: Project Denver. The only difference is that it is not X86-based, but an ARM-architecture. And most-probable the most powerful ARM-GPU of 2011. For years…
DirectCompute’s unpopularity
In the world of GPGPU we have currently 4 players: Khronos OpenCL, NVIDIA CUDA, Microsoft DirectCompute and PathScale ENZO. If you are researching DirectCompute vs CUDA, you probably know CUDA and OpenCL already (or start reading more articles from this blog)….
OpenCL Fireworks
I like and appreciate differences in the many cultures on our Earth, but also like to recognise different very old traditions everywhere to feel a sort of ancient bond. As an European citizen I’m quite familiar with the replacement of the…
OpenCL on the CPU: AVX and SSE
When AMD came out with CPU-support I was the last one who was enthusiastic about it, comparing it as feeding chicken-food to oxen. Now CUDA has CPU-support too, so what was I missing? This article is a quick overview on OpenCL…
Thalesians talk – OpenCL in financial computations
End of October I had a talk for the Thalesians, a group that organises different kinds of talks for people working or interested in the financial market. If you live in London, I would certainly recommend you visit one of their…
Engineering GPGPU into existing software
At the Thalesian talk about OpenCL I gave in London it was quite hard to find a way to talk about OpenCL for a very diverse public (without falling back to listing code-samples for 50 minutes); some knew just everything about…
New grown-ups on the block
There is one big reason StreamHPC chose for OpenCL and that is (future) hardware-support. I talked about NVIDIA versus AMD a lot, but knowing others would join soon. AMD is correct when they say the future is fusion: hybrid computing with…
OpenCL – the battle, part III
The first two parts described hardware-companies and operating systems, programming languages and software-companies, written about half a year ago. Now we focus on what has driven NVIDIA and ATI/AMD for decades: games. Disclaimer: this is an opinion-piece on the current market….
OpenCL in the Clouds
Buzz-words are cool; they are loosely defined and are actually formed by the many implementation that use the label. Like Web 2.0 which is cool javascript for the one and interaction for the other. Now we have cloud-computing, which is cluster-computing…
Learning both OpenCL and CUDA
Be sure to read Taking on OpenCL where I’ve put my latest insights – also for CUDA. The two¹ “camps” OpenCL and CUDA both claim you should first learn their language first, after which the other would be easy to learn. I’m from…