Altera has just released a free ebook “FPGAs for dummies” simply by registering to get a copy. The OpenCL sections are very high-level, composed mainly of a single block-diagram and a few paragraphs of discussion. Also included is a Black-Scholes Monte Carlo case study that includes lines of code, performance, and performance per watt comparisons against an unspecified CPU and … [Read more...]
Altera OpenCL Programmable FPGA Talks QPI, HMC, and 100G Optical Interconnect
At IDF14, Altera demonstrated some useful technology for FPGA and OpenCL FPGA developers including: (1) A Stratix® V FPGA driving a 100G optical link, (2) Micron Hybrid-Memory Cube interoperability, (3) OpenCL applications, and a biggie (4) QPI linking to an Intel Xeon Processor. This looks like an interesting platform for real-time OpenCL/FPGA development. The latter … [Read more...]
Try Intel’s OpenCL 2.0 SDK With SPIR
The Intel OpenCL 2.0 SDK is available for download. Look to . Commercial OpenCL developers note that this release includes SPIR (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) to protect your codes while preserving portability. This version supports Android and the re-architected Intel Gen8 "Broadwell" GPUs with powerful features like coherent shared virtual memory for … [Read more...]
Intel Broadwell Compute Gen8 GPU Architecture
Attention OpenCL programmers! Intel has released a detailed description of the Gen8 Broadwell GPU compute architecture, "The Compute Architecture of Intel® Processor Graphics Gen8". Broadwell is a 14nm die shrink of Intel’s microarchitecture incorporating significant reworking of the Intel HD 5000-series (Iris) Gen 7.5 GPU found in Haswell including: (1) throughput for 32-bit … [Read more...]
CUDA 340.29 Driver Significantly Boosts GPU Performance (100s GF/s For Machine-Learning)
Reports are now coming in about performance boosts that are the result of the CUDA 6.5 production release. The Blender project reports faster rendering time with CUDA-6.5. As can be seen in the graphs below that report performance on the farbopt deep-learning teaching code, CUDA-6.5 with the NVIDIA 340.29 driver have increased performance on linear problems (PCA analysis from … [Read more...]
Khronos OpenROAD Video Shows What is Possible With OpenGL and OpenCL
Khronos OpenROAD is an animated video featuring all the royalty-free Khronos APIs working together in an open ecosystem. http://youtu.be/ckD0op6OgMQ … [Read more...]
Commercial OpenCL! SPIR 2.0 Protects IP Yet Allows Powerful, Portable, Source Code Free Kernels
It used to be that portable OpenCL applications required shipping source code for the parallel kernels with the application. In this way, the kernel source code could be compiled for any device at any time in the future. Bad news from an IP protection point of view! The alternative was to pre-compile the kernels thus bloating applications and limiting the devices the OpenCL … [Read more...]
Paper Compares AMD, NVIDIA, Intel Xeon Phi CFD Turbulent Flow Mesh Performance Using OpenMP and OpenCL
Timely for Siggraph 2014 (because animations use meshes) and food-for-thought for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) research, the paper by A. Gorobets, F.X. Trias, R. Borrell, G. Oyarzún and A. Oliva, "Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flows with Parallel Algorithms for Various Computing Architectures" considers structured and unstructured meshes for incompressible … [Read more...]
Hot At Siggraph 2014 – Multithreading for Visual Effects
The ACM Siggraph conference starts tomorrow, August 10th, in Vancouver, BC. Multithreading for visual effects coupled with massive parallelism has changed the visual effects industry forever. A new book capturing that trend titled, appropriately enough, "Multithreading for Visual Effects", is an excellent source of information about how visual effects are currently performed at … [Read more...]
Intel Paper Detailing the Gen 7.5 GPU Architecture – Attention OpenCL Programmers !
Intel has labeled the Haswell graphic core as Gen 7.5 and the Ivy Bridge GPU as Gen.7. The latest Gen 7.5 Architecture paper, "The Compute Architecture of Intel® Processor Graphics Gen7.5" has now been released by Intel. This paper is written for those who wish to know the "architecture characteristics relevant to running compute applications on Intel® Processor … [Read more...]