ARM Community: GPU computing advance with new OpenCL API - ARM Community

It's an exciting time to be developing ARM Mali GPUs and CPUs at the moment. In my previous blogs I have talked about the fact that GPU computing is a fast-expanding area that is coming to the devices that ARM Partners build and that OpenCL is a big part of that. It also finds applicability beyond GPUs, on CPUs, and one of the most interesting parts of my job is looking at the differences between domain-specific computing and computing that can be done on general-purpose CPUs.

Today, Khronos have announced the latest version of the OpenCL API that ARM and other companies have been working on for a while. The new features that this brings to the API and other details are discussed here where you'll also see that ARM is supporting this.

These new features improve OpenCL, and will improve the heterogeneous computing systems containing GPUs, CPUs and other devices being developed by ARM Partners. In particular, it will allow graphics and more general-purpose computing to be performed more efficiently on CPU+GPU systems. I think that's a good thing and ARM is committed to implementing OpenCL across a range of its products.

With good APIs and a range of high-performance systems available in the market, the conditions will exist for innovation to flourish, and I'm sure we'll see some exciting uses of GPU computing along the lines I've suggested before. What do you think will come first?

Jem Davies, ARM Fellow. Jem likes to think of himself as "The Godfather" to technical talent in ARM. After spending some time in his youth writing software for satellites and traffic-lights among other fascinating things, Jem spotted the technical inflection point of the mobile industry: graphics, video and other visual processing. As VP of technology in the Media Processing Division of ARM, Jem is busy with a lot of projects involving the future of cool ARM technology, which will revolutionise how people experience and interact with digital devices.

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