AMD has announced its new Boltzmann Initiative, a new way in high performance computing which promises both significant leaps in performance as well as software compatibility and provides support for Nvidia CUDA on AMD GPUs.

AMD's Boltzmann Initiative, named after Austrian physicist and philosopher, will change AMD's focus and start an overhaul of AMD's HPC software plans, including better drivers, more performance and better software support.

The foundation of the Boltzmann Initiative are AMD drivers, which are being both improved and changed in order to support AMD's further plans. This include a new dedicated 64-bit Linux driver designed for headless Linux operation as well as HSA+ runtime. The new HSA+ extended runtime will bring advantages of the Heterogeneous System Architecture to AMD FirePro discrete GPUs.

The second part of the Boltzmann Initiative is the new compiler for high performance computing (HPC), the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC), which will both bring support for C++ but also maintain support for OpenCL.

The biggest update and the final part of the Boltzmann Initiative, which is also quite a surprising one, is AMD's implementation of Nvidia CUDA compilation, called the Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability (HIP). With HIP, AMD plans to bridge the gap between the new Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) and Nvidia CUDA, giving developers a "CUDA-like syntax" allowing them to program for AMD GPUs in a "CUDA-like fashion." The HIP will also include a set of tools which automatically convert CUDA code to HIP code that can be later compiled to either Nvidia or AMD GPUs via NVCC or HCC.

While this will not allow AMD GPUs to run complied CUDA programs, it will certainly bring AMD GPUs closer to Nvidia CUDA, although we still do not have an idea on how will Nvidia react on such a move.

AMD is certainly pushing hard into high performance computing and with support for CUDA-like programming is definitely a move in the right direction, although full CUDA compatibility would be better. The Boltzmann Initiative at least give AMD a fighting change in taking a part of that HPC market.









Source: via Anandtech.com.