Microsoft Says Heterogeneous Computing Coming To Every PC and Every Pocket – Announces C++ AMP

Microsoft kicked off the second day of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit with a great keynote presentation by Herb Sutter that started off describing how heterogeneous computing is coming and it’s going to apply to any device that we use for computing.

He also stated that mainstream media outlets like to talk about three things these days and those happen to be multicore CPUs, GPGPU and cloud Iaas/HaaS. Microsoft doesn’t see these hot topics as three different trends, but rather a single trend towards heterogeneous processors.

Microsoft feels that over the past few years, that they have been seeing an additional trend of heterogeneous hardware where, for example, developers take advantage of the GPU for computational purposes for their data parallel algorithms.

Microsoft also allowed us to take a quick look at how they believe hardware will evolve.

It looks like Microsoft is announcing C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) here at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. Microsoft plans on keeping the C++ AMP specification an open specification, but it’s interesting that Microsoft tweaked C++ rather than adding support for OpenCL.

This is an interesting development here at the summit.