[AMD] New Aviary SDK and Windows 8 App, Optimized for AMD

[Final8ty]

There seems to be nothing more ubiquitous than photos. That?s why we are proud to announce our AMD Ventures collaboration with Aviary and our work together to optimize their new Software Development Kit (SDK) and Windows 8 app for AMD platforms.

The team at Aviary has done something amazing. They?ve built something very powerful, yet really simple. And their growth proves that they are onto something big. Even if you aren?t familiar with Aviary by name, chances are you may have used their technology. Aviary is the photo editing engine behind huge services and apps such as Flickr, Yahoo! Mail and Twitter. Just recently, Aviary CEO Tobias Peggs posted a blog announcing that more than 3 billion photos have been edited using Aviary in just 18 months ? and this does not even include Twitter data!

Aviary is the photo editing engine behind huge services and apps such as Flickr, Yahoo! Mail and Twitter.

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Now, Aviary is bringing that same powerful photo editing technology to a PC OS for the first time. We thought it would be a great opportunity to demonstrate that by leveraging the unique compute capabilities of AMD APUs to make the processing of even the most complex filters and effects really, really fast.

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The result? By optimizing for the AMD APU, we saw a performance improvement of 11X on average!

How did we do it? Quite simply, we leveraged the full parallel compute power of the AMD APU. Much of that highly parallel compute capability sits on the ?GPU? side of the APU and is perfect for doing things like image manipulation. Since the target was to design a Windows Store app, we used C++ AMP to process the filters and effects on the graphics engine where it can be done much faster than processing on the traditional CPU cores. The end result is a super-fast experience that will delight consumers.

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Competitively, the APU outperforms the competition. If you compare the upcoming AMD A4-1200 APU codenamed ?Temash? designed for performance tablets to the latest Intel Atom Z2760 ?Clovertrail? processor, there is a dramatic difference with an average of 16X faster2 when applying the Aviary filters.

http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2013/03/18/new-aviary-sdk-and-windows-8-app-optimized-for-amd/