Look for AMD OpenCL-compliant SDK release in first half of 2009

Today the OpenCL CPU+GPU compute standard was ratified by the Khronos Group and AMD announced that it is making good progress on its OpenCL-compliant offering and plans to release a developer version of the ATI Stream SDK v1.4 with support for OpenCL 1.0 for content developers in the first half of 2009. Working from early specifications of OpenCL, AMD’s engineering team has already started running code on its initial implementation.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language), a way to extract computing performance out of GPUs and multicore CPUs in an architecture-independent way. In other words, programmers can use the GPU as a data-parallel coprocessor without having to go through a specialized graphics API like OpenGL or DirectX. OpenCL is designed to address more than GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units). It is really a way to enable a broad range of parallel architectures that includes GPUs, multicore CPUs, Larrabee, and even DSPs, to greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization.

The new ATI Stream SDK 1.4 will add finer grain data type support, graphics API interoperability, multi-GPU support and support for Radeon HD 4870 X2 and several ATI FirePro 3D graphics accelerators