AMD Open Sources the AMD Performance Library

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..

[Protonk]

Maybe. You are right in suggesting that visibly changing something from costly to free has negative signaling impacts. Some among us might get the impression that this is the 'lighter' version of some more powerful performance library out there, but I don't see it happening.

What I suspect will happen is that small firms using AMD processors for specific applications will have a tool to write better, lower level code. Larger software makers might not bite because this is another tailored portion o the codebase that would need to be checked but it is certainly possible (as has been mentioned here) that encoding/decoding of video could be made easier, at least for AMD.

I don't think it is magically a win-win. I think that it is likely to be a good thing for some, indifferent to others and an exceedingly small impact on the cache of AMD. All in all, we are better off.

Re:Cool it moderators!

[Protonk]

Eh. When I get mod points I am usually hesiant to mod outside my field of expertise and REALLY hesitant to mod up/down in an older story of about 100-200 posts. Who knows if a comment I modded insightful appears 1/2 dozen times a few inches below? I try to stick with newer stories and pick reasonably good comments that won't get +5 eventually, because those are going to get modded anyways.

But wait, what's this tidbit about graphics docs?

[schwaang]

From the Phoronix article:

In other news, AMD's Graphics Product Group (GPG) will be having their next open-source document dump this week.

I don't know squat about the performance lib, but the graphics stuff, now *that* could be interesting if it helps the open-source graphics driver effort.

Re:Is this that silly..

[Wesley Felter]

I disagree. These performance functions really should be integrated into system libraries like zlib, libjpeg and GStreamer, but the developers of those libraries wouldn't touch APL when it was proprietary. Now that it's open, at least open source developers will be willing to look at it. It won't guarantee success, but now it has a chance.

APL vs IPL

[ceroklis]

Anyone knows how it compares with the Intel Performance libraries ? and especially how good IPL is on an AMD processor and vice versa ?