AMD Releases APP SDK 2.8.1 with support for Bolt C++ Template Library, OpenCV, and GCN

AMD’s APP SDK is an essential resource for developers who wish to leverage the processing power of heterogeneous computing. OpenCL™ is the primary mechanism for achieving this today, but AMD’s goal is to enable developers to accelerate applications with the programming paradigm of their choice. Toward that end, AMD has added support for heterogeneous libraries such as the newly released Bolt open source C++ template library and OpenCV computer vision library which now includes heterogeneous acceleration.

New to APP SDK 2.8.1:

Bolt: With the recent launch of Bolt 1.0, AMD has added several samples to the APP SDK to demonstrate Bolt 1.0 features. These showcase the usage of Bolt APIs such as scan, sort, reduce and transform. Other new samples highlight the ease of porting from STL and the performance benefits achieved over equivalent STL implementations. We’ve also included samples to demonstrate the different fallback options available in Bolt 1.0 when no GPU is available which ensure your code runs correctly on any platform.

OpenCV: AMD has been working closely with the OpenCV open source community to add heterogeneous acceleration capability to the world’s most popular computer vision library. These changes are already integrated into OpenCV and are readily available for developers who want to improve performance and efficiency of their computer vision applications. AMD has included samples to illustrate these improvements and highlight how simple it is to include them in your app.

GCN: AMD recently launched its new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture on several AMD products. GCN is based on a scalar architecture vs. the VLIW vector architecture of prior generations, so hand-tuned vectorization to optimize hardware utilization is no longer needed. We’ve modified several samples in AMD APP SDK 2.8.1 to show the ease of writing scalar code as compared to vectorization.