30 Minute Interview

Framewave to facilitate easy application development

AMD’s Open Source Performance Library dubbed Framewave enables application developers to create enhancements to existing processor software and helps expand the functionality of current software beyond its core media capabilities to encompass multimedia duties such as image and signal processing. Earl Stahl, Vice President, Software Engineering, AMD spoke to Abhinav Singh about the Library, how it helps developers and the critical role that AMD’s Indian team played in the development of Framewave.

Earl Stahl

On Framewave

Framewave is a free and open-source collection of popular image and signal processing routines designed to accelerate application development, debugging, and optimization on x86-class processor platforms that is based on AMD’s Performance Library that was released in February 2007. Developing applications that fully utilize multi-core processor technology is complex work and Framewave enables quicker development of parallel processing code. The focus of this open source library is to expand the functionality of the base library beyond core media capabilities to multimedia such as image and signal processing. The Framewave library reduces time spent by application developers in creating enhancements to existing processor software in domains such as image and signal processing. Partners, customers and open source software developers can freely download Framewave code and contribute to it.

Framewave helps in the collection of image, signal, and math routines and accelerates development, debugging, and optimization. For instance, in a medical image processing application, Framewave can read a high definition image, encode and decode it, compress it etc. Framewave also helps in future proofing the upgrade path to new processor technologies. Its internally threaded model leverages AMD’s multi-core architectures. Its multiple code paths support various processor features and Framewave is available as both static and dynamic libraries. It supports Visual Studio, GCC (Linux/Apple) and Sun Studio and runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS.

Goal

The goal of the Framewave initiative is to facilitate easy application development such as media player, codecs, image editors, audio applications and media streaming applications. This is for x86-class processor platforms and is compatible with AMD and [Intel] processors.

Open source

Developer collaboration is one of the cornerstones of AMD’s software vision and we have supported open innovation and collaboration all along. The Framewave project is an attempt to make a major contribution to the open source community. By making it open source, we can give our customers real-time access to the latest library features, improve the quality and performance of library functions through community participation and contribution, and enable commercial, consumer, and academic use of AMD Libraries by offering source code under an acceptable licensing model (Apache v2.0). This initiative will drive performance improvements in our partner’s products while overall investment and time-to-market will shrink.

The AMD India team’s contribution

Framewave represents over three years of effort by over a dozen software engineers. AMD’s Engineering Center in Bangalore did 50% of the work on this project. The Indian team has played a significant role in the creation of this library and it has taken up the responsibility of maintaining it. The Indian team’s efforts contain around 3,200 performance routines. AMD developers will continue to be dedicated contributors to the Framewave project.