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…
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…
Intel OpenCL CPU-drivers 2013 beta with OpenCL 1.2 support
This article is still work-in-progress Intel has just released its OpenCL bit CPU-drivers, version 2013 bèta. It has support for OpenCL 1.1 (not 1.2 as for the CPU) on Intel HD Graphics 4000/2500 of the 3rd generation Core processors (Windows only). The…
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…
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…
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…
OpenCL – the battle, part I
Part I: the Hardware-companies and Operating Systems (Part II will be about programming languages and software-companies, part III about the gaming-industry) OpenCL is the new, but already de-facto standard of stream-computing; but how it got there so fast is somewhat strange….