Leadtek Starts Offering SDK for SpursEngine Developers - Every multicore chip vendor provides development kits before OpenCL popularization
Leadtek Starts Offering SDK for SpursEngine Developers
Every multicore chip vendor provides development kits before OpenCL popularization
On January 22, Leadtek Research started offering the software development kit (SDK) for the SpursEngine stream processor that is equipped on the company's video processing card, WinFast PxVC1100. The SDK is downloadable from Leadtek's website. Leadtek had announced that they would be soon providing the SDK at an event held by Toshiba at Tokyo's Akihabara area for do-it-yourself PC users in December 2008.
SpursEngine SDK is a set of tools and libraries to develop application software for SpursEngine that Toshiba developed. The SDK allows to write programs for fast processing for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec, face detection/recognition, and a variety of other multimedia tasks on PCs equipped with SpursEngine. While SpursEngine can process MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 tasks with the on-chip codec hardware, it uses four RISC processor cores called SPEs, or synergistic processing elements, for other tasks such as image recognition or signal processing.
At present, there are mainly two alternatives to perform heavy multimedia processing such as HDTV (H.264) encoding within multicore processor environment besides CPU: a dedicated stream processor such as SpursEngine or graphic processing unit or GPU.
SDKs for GPU media processing include NVIDIA' CUDA and AMD's ATI Stream, provided from each vender. With SpursEngine SDK added to the list, developers can now select the best possible development environment for media processing to come up with end-user applications, considering the usage, performance or power consumption.
Also, it is likely for every chip vender to support OpenCL, a new framework for generic parallel processing executed across heterogeneous platforms. Therefore, ultimately, it is deemed important to gain developers' support by providing ease of development, performance improvement, a large variety of libraries, and so forth, on the OpenCL basis.
