ACADEMIA

RapidMind today announced the results of benchmarks demonstrating how their platform offers developers an 8x performance advantage on a quad core CPU. In this demonstration, RapidMind performed a benchmark on a prototype implementation of the RapidMind platform for Intel Core2 Quad CPU. Recognized by software developers as providing a simple way to achieve breakthrough performance on the GPU and the Cell Broadband Engine, RapidMind’s latest benchmark confirms that the RapidMind platform will soon provide similar benefits to developers on multi-core Intel and AMD CPUs. “This demonstration shows the enormous potential of multi-core processors,” said Dr. Michael McCool, Chief Scientist at RapidMind. “Equally, it highlights the immediate need for innovations in how software is developed to take advantage of this potential. RapidMind is fulfilling this need today.” With RapidMind, software developers are able to program in standard C++, using their existing compilers and IDEs, and the resulting applications are portable and run today on either GPUs or the Cell BE. Using RapidMind, developers have achieved applications performance increases of 3x to 30x. At this year’s Multicore Expo on Tuesday, March 27 at 11:40 a.m. PT, Michael McCool will discuss how developers can use a single programming model to write applications that will run on the Cell BE, GPUs, or on multi-core CPUs, and get the most from these different architectures. Multicore Expo runs March 27-29 in Santa Clara, California. This same benchmark was originally performed in partnership with Hewlett-Packard to evaluate GPU performance. Both benchmark reports are available on the RapidMind website.