AMD Opens Up Their Performance Library

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Opens Up Their Performance Library

In another move of good faith for the open-source community, AMD has today announced it has opened up their once proprietary AMD Performance Library. The AMD Performance Library, or APL for short, has been opened up under the name of Framewave...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM0MQ

[oliver]

Some more insight on this? What does it do? How does it help us?

Not that it's not awesome that they did it :D

[puntarenas]

Not that it's not awesome that they did it :D
I couldn't agree more. I love to read things like "opens up" or "expand functonality", but what's the stuff in between about :)

Among the supported operations are H.264 video decoding
Wait a minute, wasn't that problematic because of Digital Restriction Management. I'm just a stupid user, so excuse my confusion :confused:

Nevertheless, well done AMD!

[[Knuckles]]

@puntarenas: There's no problem in doing h264 decoding, you can have h264 with no DRM. Just go to apple's trailer website and you have lots of h264 trailers.

Anyways, what I couldn't get was the license. Under what license is this being released?

[Thetargos]

Decoding the format (in this H.264) has nothing to do with DRM, however some H.264 are wrapped around encrypted containers, so it is necessary to decrypt the container to decode the content. Fortunately (apparently) the bits to actually decode the streams are not the same as the ones to decrypt the containers ;)

[puntarenas]

;25361']@puntarenas: There's no problem in doing h264 decoding, you can have h264 with no DRM. Just go to apple's trailer website and you have lots of h264 trailers.

Thanks, I mixed it up with the GPU documentations and there were some problems about documenting hardware acceleration without compromising DRM.

[Thetargos]

;25361']@puntarenas: There's no problem in doing h264 decoding, you can have h264 with no DRM. Just go to apple's trailer website and you have lots of h264 trailers.

Anyways, what I couldn't get was the license. Under what license is this being released?

Checking the project's site in SourceForge should give you an idea.

BTW, the license is Apache License V2.0 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/framewave/)

[rolz]

sounds like great news, lets check this baby out

[Uchikoma]

So I guess the impending dump that will happen this week (or if something happens the week after I suppose) will be the tcore materials?

...or will we get tcore and something more?
...or maybe something other than tcore?

[Michael]

So I guess the impending dump that will happen this week (or if something happens the week after I suppose) will be the tcore materials?

...or will we get tcore and something more?
...or maybe something other than tcore?

The article will cover in detail what is being released and the status :)

[d2kx]

We had names for Catalyst releases already, now there's:

AMD tcore doc. - The Welcome to FOSDEM drop

Can't wait for the article :)

[givemesugarr]

it seems that amd has really taken opensource support seriously. let's see how fast the oss drivers would improve after the release of the new documentation and of this performance library.

[Svartalf]

it seems that amd has really taken opensource support seriously. let's see how fast the oss drivers would improve after the release of the new documentation and of this performance library.

AMD has taken that support pretty seriously over the years. Oprofile should be more than enough proof of that (A systemwide profiler not unlike what's offered by Intel's VTune- for free and as FOSS...think about that one for a bit...). The stuff they've done in recent days with ATI's info should be proof enough of that as well- though, I will opine that it's taken them longer than they ought to for starting the whole ball rolling and it's taking longer than they probably ought to be taking on getting some of the key pieces in place, though it IS all coming together all the same. This is another good example from them.

Thanks AMD. It's really appreciated. Honest.

[yoshi314]

however some H.264 are wrapped around encrypted containers, so it is necessary to decrypt the container to decode the content.there is still a software patent issue, though. at least for those in the US :]

[curaga]

That's why we're born lucky europeans :D