AMD signs deals to help coders use parallel gear

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News this week from The Register about a pair of deals that AMD has made with parallel tools providers aimed at helping accelerate the effectiveness of developers trying to make use of new multicore chips

AMD logoFirst is a pact with Rogue Wave Software, maker of products that let developers run their single-threaded apps concurrently on multiple cores without needing significant code tinkering.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AMD said it would use Rogue’s Hydra software suite to expand its parallel computing strategy. The companies appear to be targeting the financial services industry specifically with this one — although that may have something to do with announcing the agreement at a securities and financial markets conference in New York.

…The chipmaker also got RapidMind’s version of the multi-threaded application voo-doo to work with AMD FireStream 9170 CPUs and ATI Radeon HD 3870 GPUs.

The news isn’t on AMD’s site (yet), but is at the Rogue Wave and RapidMind sites. The potential value of deals like these seem to be the creation of a de facto interface to multiple different types of parallel hardware…kind of like an MPI but abstracting architecture, not message passing semantics. Not that I’m suggesting these deals will create this, but the more we focus on putting technology into a fixed (small) set of tools for programmers, the better.