From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Close To Metal ("CTM" in short) a open thin hardware interface from AMD/ATI developed to increase processing performance of emerging GPGPU technologies for stream processing applications by as much as ten times[citation needed] more than traditional 3D application programming interfaces (APIs). CTM gives developers unfettered access to the native instruction set and memory of the massively parallel computational elements in AMD/ATI Stream Processors, and its latest Radeon R5x series of GPUs. Using CTM, stream processors effectively become powerful, programmable open architectures like today’s central processing units (CPUs). By opening up the architecture, CTM provides developers with the low-level, deterministic, and repeatable access to hardware that is necessary API to develop essential high-level programming tools such as compilers, debuggers, math libraries, and application platforms.[1]
[edit] Hardware
The R5x series of Radeon graphics chips has seen ATI introduce the concept of GPUs as 32-bit (single precision) floating point vector processors, also using the CTM SDK interface. Due to the highly parallel nature of vector processors, this can have a huge impact in specific data processing applications. The mass client project Folding@Home has reported improvements of 20 to 40 times using an R580 card [2]. It is anticipated in the industry that graphics cards may be used in future game physics calculations.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ↑ Double precision on GPUs (Proceedings of ASIM 2005): Dominik Goddeke, Robert Strzodka, and Stefan Turek. Accelerating Double Precision (FEM) Simulations with (GPUs). Proceedings of ASIM 2005 - 18th Symposium on Simulation Technique, 2005.
[edit] External links
