NVIDIA Opens Up CUDA Platform, releases source code
Posted: 14 Dec 2011, 19:11
nVidia wrote:BEIJING -- (Marketwire) -- 12/13/2011 -- GTC Asia -- NVIDIA today announced that it will provide the source code for the new NVIDIA® CUDA® LLVM-based compiler to academic researchers and software-tool vendors, enabling them to more easily add GPU support for more programming languages and support CUDA applications on alternative processor architectures.
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wikipedia wrote:The LLVM JIT compiler can optimize unneeded static branches out of a program at runtime, and thus is useful for partial evaluation in cases where a program has many options, most of which can easily be determined unneeded in a specific environment. This feature is used in the OpenGL pipeline of Mac OS X Leopard (v10.5) to provide support for missing hardware features.[4] Graphics code within the OpenGL stack was left in intermediate form, and then compiled when run on the target machine. On systems with high-end GPUs, the resulting code was quite thin, passing the instructions onto the GPU with minimal changes. On systems with low-end GPUs, LLVM would compile optional procedures that run on the local central processing unit (CPU) that emulate instructions that the GPU cannot run internally. LLVM improved performance on low-end machines using Intel GMA chipsets. A similar system was developed under the Gallium3D LLVMpipe, and incorporated into the GNOME shell to allow it to run without a GPU.[5]
I learned a little, very little, from this interesting bunch of words.
