Adobe accelerates CS6 with OpenCL

Speed for the unwashed masses

AMD FirePro LogoAdobe and AMD today announced that the next Creative Suite 6 (CS6) will be OpenCL based. This is quite an interesting turn of events from the last version, and is a big step forward towards open standards.

If you recall, the last version of Creative Suite was GPU accelerated based on Nvidia’s Cuda, thus locking it to Nvidia’s GPUs. CS6 breaks that, and with OpenGL and OpenCL acceleration, it should work just fine on all GPUs, CPUs, and even ARM chips should that ever be needed. It could even be accelerated on Macs now too.

Given that Adobe’s Tom Malloy is giving a keynote at AMD’s AFDS conference this June, you would be forgiven if you thought the two were somewhat related. The best part of all of this is that now, CS6 can be GPU accelerated on an off the shelf consumer GPU, you don’t need to spend thousands on an overpriced ‘pro’ card. A pro card may make things go a little faster, but now with CS6, OpenCL means that you can get a lot of that goodness with from the cards you already own.S|A

Editors note: You can learn more about this type of material at AFDS 2012. More articles of this type can be found on SemiAccurate’s AFDS 2012 links page.  Special for our readers if you register for AFDS 2012 and use promo code SEMI12, you get $50 off.

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate