Software

Software

The AMD FireStream was launched with a wide range of software platform support. One of the supporting firms was PeakStream (acquired by Google in June 2007), who was first to provide an open beta version of software to support CTM and AMD FireStream as well as x86 and Cell (Cell Broadband Engine) processors. The FireStream was claimed to be 20 times faster in typical applications than regular CPUs after running PeakStream's software[citation needed]. RapidMind also provided stream processing software that worked with ATI and NVIDIA, as well as Cell processors.
[edit] Software Development Kit

AMD first released its Stream Computing SDK (v1.0), in December 2007 under the AMD EULA, to be run on Windows XP.[12] The SDK includes "Brook+", an AMD hardware optimized version of the Brook language developed by Stanford University, itself a variant of the ANSI C (C language), open-sourced and optimized for stream computing. The AMD Core Math Library (ACML) and AMD Performance Library (APL) with optimizations for the AMD FireStream and the COBRA video library (further renamed as "Accelerated Video Transcoding" or AVT) for video transcoding acceleration will also be included. Another important part of the SDK, the Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL), is a software development layer aimed for low-level access, through the CTM hardware interface, to the GPU architecture for performance tuning software written in various high-level programming languages.

AMD had announced with SDK v2 the support of OpenCL, a parallel computing language developed by Khronos Group, as well as the concept of compute shader in Microsoft's next generation API called DirectX 11 in future releases of the AMD Stream SDK [13]
[edit] Advantages