Graphics circuits of today are not only meant to render pixels at abnormal rates, but also be capable of using the billions of transistors for everyday generic tasks. NVIDIA has its “closed” CUDA standard that has come a long way with GPGPU support where its graphics circuits are used for everything from accelerating video rendering to protein folding in Folding@home. AMD is going all in with its DirectX 11 support and has no intention of being worse than NVIDIA, and could be in a unique position on the semiconductor market.
AMD is currently waiting for certificates by the Khronos group for its ATI Radeon architecture that will be compatible with the programming framework OpenCL. OpenCL is a free standard that allows developers to write programs that can be executed by both GPUs and CPUs no matter base architecture.
If AMD gets its certification it will be the first semiconductor manufacturer to offer both CPU and GPU with OpenCL support, the free standard that hopes to dethrone NVIDIA CUDA.
Count on more information on OpenCL when we present AMD’s new Radeon HD 5800 family later this week.
