AMD has announced the Boltzmann Initiative to compete against Intel and NVIDIA in the HPC market this week at SC15. It is not a physical product but rather new a way to unite the processing power of HSA compliant AMD APUs and FirePro GPUs. They have announced several new projects including the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) and Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability (HIP) for CUDA based apps which can automatically convert CUDA code into C++. They also announced a headless Linux driver and HSA runtime infrastructure interface for managing clusters which utilizes their InfiniBand fabric interconnect to interface system memory directly to GPU memory as well as adding P2P GPU support and numerous other enhancements. Check out more at DigiTimes.
"The Boltzmann Initiative leverages HSA's ability to harness both central processing units (CPU) and AMD FirePro graphics processing units (GPU) for maximum compute efficiency through software."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Microsoft Open-Sources Visual Studio Code @ Slashdot
- Microsoft's gamble pays off as half of enterprises pledge Windows 10 in 2016 @ The Inquirer
- Microsoft chief Satya drops an S bomb in Windows 10, cloud talk @ The Register
- Trend Micro warns of Ashley Madison fallout and rise in data breaches @ The Inquirer
- How to Test-Drive OpenStack @ Linux.com
- Adobe releases out-of-band security patches – amazingly not for Flash @ The Register
- Asus RP-AC56 802.11ac wireless extender @ Kitguru
Yes as a set of software
Yes as a set of software migration tools to convert that proprietary CUDA code into something cross platform and open standards based. AMD in advance of releasing its HPC Zen based HPC APUs on an interposer is releasing the tools necessary to help CUDA users migrate over to the open standards software ecosystem. A necessary move for AMD to re-enter the HPC/Server market with its Zen based HPC/workstation and Greenland GPU accelerated APU line. Add to that some FPGA dies sandwiched between the HBM bottom controller die and the HBM memory dies above for some extra FPGA compute right in the HBM’s stack, and things are looking good for AMD in the HPC/workstation/Exascale market.