Microsoft & AMD Release C++ AMP Compiler With Linux Support

AMD and Microsoft jointly released C++ AMP version 1.2 compiler that supports Linux alongside Windows. Ubuntu is the officially supported distribution at this time.

AMD with support from Microsoft have been developing a C++ AMP 1.2 compiler implementation that will support HSA devices for AMD APUs but also support NVIDIA hardware and other platforms by dumping the output to Khroos SPIR or OpenCL C. AMP in this context is short for Accelerated Massive Parallelism. Microsoft originally developed AMP on DirectX 11 and is similar in nature to OpenMP but designed to exploit the parallel capabilities of graphics processors. Intel has been experimenting with implementing C++ AMP over LLVM/Clang for some time on Linux but there hasn't been any news on that effort lately while an independent developer using LLVM also tackled C++ AMP support to target NVIDIA GPUs with OpenCL. AMD is investing in C++ AMP over LLVM/Clang now to further their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) agenda.

AMD's cppamp-driver-ng compiler project will take C++ AMP 1.2 compliant code and transform it into HSAIL/BRIG for AMD HSA devices or Khronos SPIR and OpenCL C for other hardware. The Clang-based compiler is called Clamp and there's also the libcxxamp runtime library.

Overall this work appears interesting and we'll certainly be following it on Phoronix. This new C++ AMP compiler with Ubuntu Linux support can be found hosted at BitBucket.org.