Microsoft Demos C++ AMP Heterogeneous Computing at AMD's Fusion Developer Summit

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 02:14 PM EDT

The second day of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit began with a keynote from Microsoft’s Herb Sutter, Principal Architect, Native Languages and resident C++ guru. The gist of Herb’s talk centered around heterogeneous computing and the changes coming with future versions of Visual Studio and C++.

One of the main highlights of the talk was a demo of a C++ AMP application that seamlessly took advantage of all of the compute resources within a few of the various demo systems, from workstations to netbooks. The application seamlessly switched from using CPU, integrated GPU, and discrete GPU resources, showcasing the performance capabilities of each. Heterogeneous computing capabilities in Visual Studio and C++ will be rolling out over the course of this year and next, but details of the release dates are sketchy at the moment. The demo, however, was rather interesting to see live. In this physics simulation, bodies are tracked in relation to each other and as additional bodies are added, workload increases with a ramp-up to 100s of GFLops in compute performance.

In addition to demonstrating the benefits C++ AMP in general, Herb also disclosed that the C++ AMP is going to open specification such that other compilers can target C++ AMP optimizations.

Tags: AMD, Microsoft, GPGPU, Enterprise, Programming, parallelism, AFDS, C++, heterogeneous

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com