Say you have some data that needs to be used as input for a larger kernel, but needs a little preparation to get it aligned in memory (small kernel and random reads). Unluckily the efficiency of such kernel is very low…
AMD positions FirePro S10000 against both TESLA K10 (and K20)
During the “little” HPC-show, SC12, several vendors have launched some very impressive products. Question is who steals the show from whom? Intel got their Phi-processor finally launched, NVIDIA came with the TESLA K20 plus K20X, and AMD introduced the FirePro S10000….
AMD’s answer to NVIDIA TESLA K10: the FirePro S9000
Recently AMD announced their new FirePro GPUs to be used in servers: the S9000 (shown at the right) and the S7000. They use passive cooling, as server-racks are actively cooled already. AMD partners for servers will have products ready Q1 2013 or even…
The CPU is dead. Long live the CPU!
Look at the computers and laptops sold at your local computer shop. There are just few systems with a separate GPU, neither as PCI-device nor integrated on the motherboard. The graphics are handled by the CPU now. The Central Processing Unit…
How expensive is an operation on a CPU?
Programmers know the value of everything and the costs of nothing. I saw this quote a while back and loved it immediately. The quote by Alan Perlis is originally about Perl LISP-programmers, but only highly trained HPC-programmers seem to have obtained…
Installing both NVidia GTX and AMD Radeon on Linux for OpenCL
August 2012: article has been completely rewritten and updated. For driver-specific issues, please refer to this article. Want to have both your GTX and Radeon working as OpenCL-devices under Linux? The bad news is that attempts to get Radeon as a…
AMD OpenCL coding competition
The AMD OpenCL coding competition seems to be Windows 7 64bit only. So if you are on another version of Windows, OSX or (like me) on Linux, you are left behind. Of course StreamHPC supports software that just works anywhere (seriously, how…
OpenCL Developer support by NVIDIA, AMD and Intel
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
X86 Systems-on-a-Chip and GPGPU
The System-on-a-chip (SoC) for X86 will be a revolution for GPGPU. Why? Because currently a big problem is transferring data from CPU-memory to GPU-memory and back, which will be solved with SoCs. Below you can read this architecture-target is very possible….
All the members of the OpenCL working group 2010
(If you’re searching for companies who offer OpenCL-products and services, please visit OpenCL:Pro) You probably have heard AMD is on the OpenCL working group of Khronos; but there are many more and they possibly all have plans to use it. Here…