Advanced Micro Devices is throwing its weight behind both the OpenCL programming language and Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 11 APIs for use with its line of general-purpose graphics processing units.

AMD, which announced official support for both OpenCL and DirectX 11 on Aug. 6, will begin upgrading its Stream SDK (software development kit) during the next 18 months to help developers take advantage of GPU acceleration when building new types of applications. In the enterprise, this could mean applications for HPC (high-performance computing), or for commercial uses such as games that require three-dimensional graphics rendering.

On the chip side, AMD is working toward combing a CPU and a GPU on the same piece of silicon in a project called Accelerated Computing. This move was a major reason behind the company's purchase of ATI in 2006, which has drained AMD financially. AMD has also recently released a GPU called the FireStream 9250, which is specially built for the HPC market.

The news of AMD's support for OpenCL and DirectX 11 comes in the same week that Intel pulled back the curtain on its much-anticipated "Larrabee" processor, which Intel plans to release in either 2009 or 2010 as a discrete graphics processor that uses x86 processing cores with an optimized architecture to handle graphics.

Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.