AMD Open Sources the AMD Performance Library 59
bluephone writes "Today AMD announced that they're now opening the source to the AMD Performance Library (APL) under the Apache license. The newly opened code is now hosted at SourceForge (the corporate overlord of Slashdot) under its new name, Framewave. Phoronix says, "The AMD Performance Library / Framewave covers a multitude of operations from simple math operations to media processing and optimizations for multi-core environments." No word as to if it does your laundry. The SourceForge page says that while Framewave is 'sponsored' by AMD, it is "very much an open-source venture. While AMD will continue to participate in and contribute to the project, third-party developers are welcome and encouraged to implement all or part of the code base and/or to create derivative works." Being Apache licensed, it's quite open, so this doesn't seem to be mere lip service."
Re:Is this that silly.. (Score:5, Informative)
No. If you look, you'll see that H.264 video decoding is one of the included features of the libraries. I expect to see encoding added in the future.
Re:Is this that silly.. (Score:5, Informative)
These microcode updates are used to fix bugs in the original hard-coded microcode. Being able to update the microcode is a great feature, because it often means you get a bug fix without actually replacing the physical cpu.
Re:Is this that silly.. (Score:5, Informative)
A processor "driver" would support non-standard features like non-ACPI advanced power management, runtime tuning, the aforementioned microcode update, and so on. For instance, AMD's driver interfaces with their "Cool'N'Quiet" power scaling system (Linux has a driver built into the kernel so you generally don't need to care, but in Windows you have to install it manually).
Re:Is this that silly.. (Score:4, Informative)
The other big thing that CPU drivers do is handle advanced power management features. Modern processors are capable of scaling down the processor speed to save power and reduce heat when the processor is mostly idle. The CPU drivers handle this.
So, anyway, the drivers are completely optional. They're just a means of fixing bugs and providing support for advanced functionality.
Re:Dude, WTF does this even do? (Score:4, Informative)
This library has optimized implementations of a lot of mathematical algorithms, with stuff like the video and jpeg decoding being the most complex stuff. It also has some of the more fundamental operations for signal processing and the like.
Re:Dude, WTF does this even do? (Score:4, Informative)
Microcode for beginners... FYI (Score:5, Informative)
CISC instructions, that are not fully implemented in microcode, get dynamically recomplied into other intructions. Microcode is HOW those instructions get implemented.
Also: Jump/Load/Store instructions do go through microcode. All memory accesses do. It makes things faster and simpler.
Microcode is HOW CPU instructions get implemented. ADD is implemented in microcode, becuase it has to interface the data queues with the ALU.
The way Intel Does it, is that The microcode gets copied from a disk file, and then gets loaded into a special place on the CPU, that stores bug-fixed instructions. ROM does not contain microinstruction fixes, except on Intel Boards. (It does not get updated often enough.)
The CPU driver handles Multiple CPUs. ( Its called the HAL ). Cool and Quiet/ACPI is also handled here.
Refrence: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/234558 [microsoft.com]
and
Refrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode [wikipedia.org].
I cannot believe that I brough this up, and only got a 1, while others, in just adding a tiny explaination get a 4 or 5. PickyWicky
Re:Is this that silly.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will it be shipped with Linux distributions? (Score:2, Informative)