Target Multiple GPU Architectures with New C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

S Somasegar, Developer Division Senior Vice President, announced C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) that helps you target graphics hardware from all the major hardware vendors. The idea is to provide a way you can build out your software on massively parallel to include both GPU and APUs.

Soma also announced Microsoft’s intent to make C++ AMP an open specification.

We expect that it will be part of the next Visual C++ compiler and fully integrated in the next release of Visual Studio experience.

The announcement was made at AMD Fusion Developer Summit. More information is available on his blog post, Targeting Heterogeneity with C++ AMP and PPL.

About Accelerated Massive Parallelism

Accelerated Massive Parallelism is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP.  AMP provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file.

AMP builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer.

For more information, see Daniel Moth’s blot post C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism.

Enhancements to Parallel Patterns Library Announced

Soma also announced new enhancements to the next version of Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) and the C++ Concurrency Runtime. You can find easy-to-use C++ templates and runtime support to express algorithms for your domain expertise which scale on any provided hardware with PPL, Agent and the C++ Concurrency Runtime.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation