AMD Releases OpenCL SDK For Linux Too

[deanjo]

Or have you never debugged a large project before?

Very large projects. I do it for a living. We constantly qualify our products against not only against current releases of OS's AND OS's that are set to be released in the future once developer previews are released. That's the whole idea of developer releases of OS's.

[Veerappan]

Looks like a good development to me. Between Gallium3D and this OpenCL SDK, it should hopefully allow developers to write/test their OpenCL code against multiple compilers/libraries, which sounds great to me.

Not only that, but it means that anyone who doesn't have a strong graphics card in their machine can still run OpenCL programs, albeit at a slower pace.

And really, if they started development 8+ months ago, OpenSUSE 11.0 possibly was the latest release. They started developing on that version on some of their machines, and instead of upgrading their distro halfway through the development cycle, they finished on that release. Would you really want to introduce a completely unknown set of possible issues into your troubleshooting process halfway through a development cycle after you had already pinpointed a good number of the 11.0 release's issues? I don't know about you, but I'd finish development using my development system's current setup, and then worry about working the kinks out on newer versions.

As has been said before, this is a beta release. They know it works on OpenSUSE 11.0, and Ubuntu 8.04. They'll eventually officially support newer versions, after they've tested the SDK on them more extensively. They've probably ran the SDK on newer versions, but just haven't really put it through its paces on newer releases yet.

[deanjo]

Looks like a good development to me. Between Gallium3D and this OpenCL SDK, it should hopefully allow developers to write/test their OpenCL code against multiple compilers/libraries, which sounds great to me.

Not only that, but it means that anyone who doesn't have a strong graphics card in their machine can still run OpenCL programs, albeit at a slower pace.

And really, if they started development 8+ months ago, OpenSUSE 11.0 possibly was the latest release. They started developing on that version on some of their machines, and instead of upgrading their distro halfway through the development cycle, they finished on that release. Would you really want to introduce a completely unknown set of possible issues into your troubleshooting process halfway through a development cycle after you had already pinpointed a good number of the 11.0 release's issues? I don't know about you, but I'd finish development using my development system's current setup, and then worry about working the kinks out on newer versions.

As has been said before, this is a beta release. They know it works on OpenSUSE 11.0, and Ubuntu 8.04. They'll eventually officially support newer versions, after they've tested the SDK on them more extensively. They've probably ran the SDK on newer versions, but just haven't really put it through its paces on newer releases yet.

I'm sure they did start development 8 or months ago, I'm not disputing that fact. Now let's look at the same type of project for Nvidia. Cuda 2.2 was in development months before openSUSE 11.1's release. Upon first released beta it was already qualified against openSUSE 10.1 - 11.1, SLED 10 - 11, RHEL 3 - 5, Fedora 7 - 10, Ubuntu 7.04 - 9.04. The latest official release even supports Win 7. The same goes for their openCL driver and SDK.

Is it any wonder why nvidia constantly beats ATI to the punch in supporting new distro's?

[crumja]

I know that nvidia is overflowing with devs who work on driver and OS support. They're also more aggressive in targeting newer OS releases. ATI's drivers and software are mainly targeted at the professional market, where the latest OS is not as popular as it is for consumers.

[deanjo]

I know that nvidia is overflowing with devs who work on driver and OS support. They're also more aggressive in targeting newer OS releases. ATI's drivers and software are mainly targeted at the professional market, where the latest OS is not as popular as it is for consumers.

If that was the case then they would be testing against SLED instead of openSUSE.

[mirv]

I might point out that amd would know what systems their customers use better than anyone else. These things are not chosen willy-nilly.
But on topic, it's really good to see amd getting behind opencl like this. It will hopefully help tie cpu & gpu processing together to get the best performance overall with less tweaking effort.

[deanjo]

I might point out that amd would know what systems their customers use better than anyone else.

This doesn't seem to be the case. Professional workstations typically use long term support releases over short term edge releases. This is why distributors of workstation class machines (ones that offer a suse flavor) bundle with SLE instead of openSUSE. SLE does get bug fixes that are not limited to critical or security releases where as openSUSE more often then not those fixes are incorporated in the next release.