AMD Performance Library

The AMD Performance Library (APL) is a high performance optimized library consisting of low level API's for Image processing, Signal processing, JPEG and Video functionality. These API's are programmed with task level parallelization(Multi-Threading) and instruction level parallelization(SIMD) resulting in maximum performance on the AMD multi-core processors. It has been released as a free software project called Framewave, under the Apache licence.

Overview

The AMD Performance Library was developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and consists of a collection of popular software routines designed to accelerate application development, debugging, and optimization on x86 class processors. It includes both simple arithmetic routines as well as more complex functions for applications such as image and signal processing. APL is available as a static library for 32- or 64-bit versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and GCC 4.1, and as a 32- or 64-bit dynamic library for the Linux, Microsoft Windows or Solaris operating systems.

Framewave

While the functionality remains similar, on 2008-02-20 AMD deprecated the APL library in favor of an open-source derivative called "Framewave".cite web
url=http://developer.amd.com/TOOLS/APL/Pages/default.aspx
title=AMD Performance Library (APL)
publisher=AMD
date=February 20, 2008
accessdate = 2008-02-20|] cite web
url=http://developer.amd.com/tools/libraries/framewave/Pages/default.aspx
title=The Framewave Project
publisher=AMD
date=February 20, 2008
accessdate = 2008-02-20|] cite web
url=http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~123872,00.html
title=AMD Accelerates Application Development with Inaugural Release of Open Source Performance Library
publisher=AMD
date=February 20, 2008
accessdate = 2008-02-20|] Framewave is licensed under the Apache License version 2.0, which is compatible with version 3.0 of the GPL.

The latest version of Framewave(FW_1.2_14July08_BETA) as on July 2008 is available in 32 and 64-bit static libraries of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and GCC 4.3, and as a 32 and 64-bit dynamic libraries for the Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac operating systems. There has been some noticeable performance gains in several API’s including JPEG in comparison with Framewave 1.0.

Features

APL consists of the following main components: cite web
url=http://developer.amd.com/apl.jsp
title=AMD Performance Library (APL)
publisher=AMD
date=February 1, 2007
accessdate = 2007-06-05|]
* Simple interface to take advantage of latest hardware innovations
** MMX
** SSE, SSE2
** Multi-core CPUs
* Faster development of multimedia projects
** Media players
** Codecs
** Image editors
** Audio applications
* Easy path to multi-threading

APL 1.1

Released on 2007-09-19, APL 1.1 added the following feature enhancements:cite web
url=http://developer.amd.com/apl2.jsp
title=APL Product Features
publisher=AMD
date=September 19, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-19|]

* Video Decoding (H.264) support
* JPEG support
* AMD "Barcelona" quad-core processor optimizations
* Support for Sun Studio compilers for Solaris

External links

* [http://developer.amd.com/apl.jsp APL main page]
* [http://developer.amd.com/apl_help/index.html APL 1.1 User's Guide]
* [http://developer.amd.com/articles.jsp?id=131&num=1 Using the New AMD Performance Library]
* [http://developer.amd.com/articles.jsp?id=122&num=1 AMD Performance Library: Blazing your Way to Glory]
* [http://framewave.sourceforge.net/ AMD Framewave main page]
* [http://framewave.sourceforge.net/Framewave_pdf/Framewave_Programming_Reference.pdf Framewave Programming Reference in .pdf format]

References