AMD's Paying For Some Open-Source OpenCL Love

[AnonymousCoward]

They already have an infrastructure, it's called Catalyst. Yes it sucks. But I don't think this is about supporting open source or Linux, I think this is about promoting the use of OpenCL in apps, because only if apps start leveraging the GPU they can compete with Intel.

[popper]

:wave:

Michael said:

"AMD's interested in driving the use of OpenCL within the open-source world, and they're willing to pay for it. One of their new contracts is to have more of the OpenCL work for GIMP/GEGL on the Open Computing Language. "

..."GSoC has obviously been over for a few months, but there's now word that AMD is financing the student developer (Victor Oliveira) to keep working on this code. "I've been contacted by AMD and they are very interested in OpenCL adoption by the Open-Source community and want to help me to continue this project. So, I'll be continuing it as a contractor for AMD in the next few months. Of course, all code will be Open-Source. In fact, I've been developing it in my Gegl branch." ....
"

"AMD's interested in driving the use of OpenCL within the open-source world" indeed, did you forget already what
a mess last chrismas's SDK release turned into where they included the OVDecode.lib for the windows 32bit install, but OVDecode.so Never actually appeared in the 32 bit linux lib/x86 dir, did that change all of a sudden today as regards the OpenCL OpenVideo driver for video decode ( the only part many of us care about as a first step), a full year later !

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...163#post161163
gbeauche said: "OpenVideo has public headers and private (or inexistent) libraries for Linux. Ever seen something right at ATI? "

etc....

never mind paying for it, how about they actually release compile the damned OVDecode code for linux use and give it some DCAA

[Kano]

Amd has got huge performance problems as the speed/core is not good. But compared to intel they have got the faster gpu. Amd officially dislikes cpu only benchmarks - they hate sysmark as their cpus win absolutely nothing against Intel. So they NEED software that can use the gpu. They do nothing else than Nvidia, they even helped to produce CUDA apps because those do not run on Amd gpus. In order to win some benchmarks AMD needs OpenCL, so they need an app that really speeds up using it. Paying a developer to create what they need is somehow logical, but the idea comes a bit late

[Qaridarium]

Amd has got huge performance problems as the speed/core is not good. But compared to intel they have got the faster gpu. Amd officially dislikes cpu only benchmarks - they hate sysmark as their cpus win absolutely nothing against Intel. So they NEED software that can use the gpu. They do nothing else than Nvidia, they even helped to produce CUDA apps because those do not run on Amd gpus. In order to win some benchmarks AMD needs OpenCL, so they need an app that really speeds up using it. Paying a developer to create what they need is somehow logical, but the idea comes a bit late

you are right its only logic and no its never to late.

[leeenux]

Amd has got huge performance problems as the speed/core is not good.

Yeah, provided you're using this logic:

take a single-threaded benchmarks where AMD ties Intel, normalize to 8 core vs 4 core(because hyperthreading is magically much less like a real core in this particular scenario than it normally is when Intel fans are bragging about it), then exclaim "well, it took AMD twice as many cores just to tie Intel, so they're half as fast per core".

Although Llano and Trinity should certainly stomp anything Intel has when properly utilizing GPU compute, but when AMD benchmarks 8 x faster than Intel in Gimp3, everyone will start counting shaders as cores; "OMG, AMD needed 120x more cores to beat Intel by a mere 800%!!!! FAIL!!!!!"

[Qaridarium]

Yeah, provided you're using this logic:

take a single-threaded benchmarks where AMD ties Intel, normalize to 8 core vs 4 core(because hyperthreading is magically much less like a real core in this particular scenario than it normally is when Intel fans are bragging about it), then exclaim "well, it took AMD twice as many cores just to tie Intel, so they're half as fast per core".

Although Llano and Trinity should certainly stomp anything Intel has when properly utilizing GPU compute, but when AMD benchmarks 8 x faster than Intel in Gimp3, everyone will start counting shaders as cores; "OMG, AMD needed 120x more cores to beat Intel by a mere 800%!!!! FAIL!!!!!"

in fact a shader is a kind of core.

but if you count shader then a 4core intel cpu is a "16" integer shader system + 8 fpu shaders + 16 sse shaders means the intel cpu do have 40 shaders@3-4ghz compared to the 500-800mhz its like 160shaders@the same clock speed.
in fact a 'out of order' cpu should be against the law just because it is a Bluff to Bluff a higher single-core performance.

the graphic cards just don't do the same Bluff but in the end they beat the cpus in speed.

[Kano]

Maybe the timing is not optimal for Amd because most likely Intel will ship DX11 gpus next year around the same time when the Gimp job is expected to be done. Most likely the hardware would be able to handle OpenCL as well and if they are unlucky Intel will beat em again even with optimized software with gpu support. They really should have done more of those things before to shine in benchmarks. For desktop users often a simple i3 dual core is the better choice than trinity athlons because of the simple fact that most of the software today still is single threaded and does not require more than two cores (and does not use OpenCL as well). Of course for Gentoo/Arch/Bsd users this is usually not the case but for average users the cpu works slower for common tasks. Those users can be convinced by cheap prices but not via benchmarks.

[Sidicas]

why they decided to fund GEGL???. i mean its important for many projects but its not something really important like infrastructure (ie clover, openGL 4, g3d video etc)

Because GIMP is one of those apps that runs on Windows, has a very large market share on Windows (more people run GIMP under Windows than those who run GIMP under Linux), and it would significantly benefit Windows users, and I could easily see AMD marketing graphics products for GIMP with GEGL support.. Clover doesn't really benefit Windows users since they all use proprietary drivers anyway, Windows users don't need OpenGL4 because they have DX11 which is better... etc. etc. I think GEGL was a very good move as it has a huge market area (Linux + Windows) users and it's something they can use to market their OpenCL graphics cards, not to mention that they're also doing something for the open source community.. There's a lot of pros in this move by AMD if you look at the bigger picture.

[DarkCloud]

I'd love to see OpenCL extensions added to Qt, the defacto open source C++ cross platform framework. Efforts focused on one project like QT can populate into thousands of other projects and products giving the desktop a new renaissance not available to those mamby-pamby tablet applications

[89c51]

Because GIMP is one of those apps that runs on Windows, has a very large market share on Windows (more people run GIMP under Windows than those who run GIMP under Linux), and it would significantly benefit Windows users, and I could easily see AMD marketing graphics products for GIMP with GEGL support.. Clover doesn't really benefit Windows users since they all use proprietary drivers anyway, Windows users don't need OpenGL4 because they have DX11 which is better... etc. etc. I think GEGL was a very good move as it has a huge market area (Linux + Windows) users and it's something they can use to market their OpenCL graphics cards, not to mention that they're also doing something for the open source community.. There's a lot of pros in this move by AMD if you look at the bigger picture.

afaik most windows users just pirate photoshop