When CUDA kept having a dominance over OpenCL, AMD introduced HIP – a programming language that closely resembles CUDA. Now it doesn’t take months to port code to AMD hardware, but more and more CUDA-software converts to HIP without problems. The real large and complex code-bases only take a few weeks max, where we found that solved problems also made the CUDA-code run faster.
The only problem is that CUDA-libraries need to have their HIP-equivalent to be able to port all CUDA-software.
Here is where we come in. We helped AMD make a high-performance Pseudo Random Generator (PRNG) Library, called rocRAND. Random number generation is important in many fields, from finance (Monte Carlo simulations) to Cryptographics, and from procedural generation in games to providing white noise. For some applications it’s enough to have some data, but for large simulations the PRNG is the limiting factor. Continue reading “Learn about AMD’s PRNG library we developed: rocRAND – includes benchmarks”



It takes quite some effort to program FPGAs using VHDL or Verilog. Since several years Intel/Altera has OpenCL-drivers, with the goal to reduce this effort. OpenCL-on-FPGAs reduced the required effort to a quarter of the time, while also making it easier to alter the specifications during the project. Exactly the latter was very beneficiary when creating the demo, as the to-be-solved problem was vaguely defined. The goal was to make a video look like a cartoon using image filters. We soon found out that “cartoonized” is a vague description, and it took several iterations to get the right balance between blur, color-reduction and edge-detection. 

A month ago IWOCL (OpenCL workshop) and DHPCC++ (C++ for GPUs) took place. Meanwhile many slides and posters have been
Most of our projects are around performance optimisation, but we’re cleaning up bugs too. This is because you can only speed up software when certain types of bugs are cleared out. A few months ago, we got a different type of request. If we could solve bugs in MESA 3D that appear in games.
In the perfect world all software is fast, giving us time to do actual work. Unfortunately we live in an unperfect world, and we have to spend extra time controlling our anger as the software keeps us waiting.









As of 1 April we are 7 years old. Because of all the jokes on that day, this post is a bit later.
With 

