Is it worth learning AMD-specific APIs?

Question

I'm currently learning the APIs related to Intel's parallelization libraries such as TBB, MKL and IPP. I was wondering, though, whether it's also worth looking at AMD's part of the puzzle. Or would that just be a waste of time? (I must confess, I have no clue about AMD's library support - at all - so would appreciate any advice you might have.)

Just to clarify, the reason I'm going the Intel way is because 1) the APIs are very nice; and 2) Intel seems to be taking tool support as seriously as API support. (Once again, I have no clue how AMD is doing in this department.)

Answer 1

If your company sells packages of just Intel Servers with your software, then you shouldn't bother learning the AMD approach. But if you're going to have to offer software for both (or many) different platforms, then it might be worth looking into the different technologies. It will be very difficult to create the wrappers for the hardware-specific libraries. (Especially since threading is involved.)

And you definitely don't want to write completely separate implementation for each hardware configuration. In fact, if your software is to be consumed by a generic user, then you may want to abandon the Intel technology, and use standard threading techniques. I don't mean to be discouraging, but I believe that the Intel threading libraries are a bit ahead of their time for all intents and purposes.

Answer 2

Only worth it if you are specifically interested in building something like Video games, Operating systems, database servers, or virtualization software. In other words: if you have a segment where you care enough about performance to take the time to do it (and do it right) in assembler. The same is true for Intel.

Answer 3

The MKL and IPP libraries will perform (nearly) as well on AMD machines. My guess is that TBB will also run just fine on AMD boxes. If I had to suggest a technology that would be beneficial and useful to both, it would be to master the OpenMP libraries. The Intel compiler with the OpenMP extensions is stunningly fast and works with AMD chips also.