Comments

@martin w: Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

The answer to your question is in this blog post and the links it points to: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nativeconcurrency/archive/2012/02/26/divisibility-requirement-of-tiled-extent-in-c-amp.aspx

If you still have questions after reading those, please post to our forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/parallelcppnative/threads

Hi Sam, sounds like you are new to C++ AMP - welcome!

CUDA, OpenCL, and C++ AMP all have comparable performance, so your opening statement is not quite true, sorry. The advantage of the latter two is that the they support executing on hardware from multiple vendors. The further advantage of C++ AMP is that it is a more productive environment to code in.

Please watch the other videos in this series (e.g. start with this and that) and if you still have questions we welcome them in the forum, as per the link above. If you are familiar with the other approaches we also have learning guides for OpenCL and for CUDA to get you started.

@Spetum: @Aiboy: Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.

@Elad:Thanks, glad you found it interesting. Yes I leave the time measurement to you so you can explore the benefits on your specific hardware

@John: Me too!

@Pavone: Cool, that is the purpose of these screecnasts: to kick start your learning. When you are ready, please follow the links above for more in depth information and I look forward to what you'll build.

@banjomatic: Thanks for the feedback. On the screencasts front, our current plan is to get you started with the base API concepts and a straightforward/minimal example. So we have this intro video, and a similar 4-part introduction (part 1, part2, part3, part 4). Building on that intro to the core API, there is an intro to the tiled model (more API coverage). Looks like you read my mind , and next I will be publishing a matrix multiplication walkthrough screencast, and I have a couple others in the plans. Stay tuned here on the channel9 C++ AMP feed.

Our feeling is that once you have watched all those, you should be perfectly comfortable to download and explore the more involved samples on your own (without a video/screencast accompaniment) – please pick your favorite from the C++ AMP samples list. BTW, every sample has a dedicated blog post describing it, so if you have questions around understanding a specific sample, please leave a comment on the specific blog post for the sample, or ask in the C++ AMP support forum. Thanks for watching!

@johnathon: LOL.... "this guy" also wants that fast coding ability, without having  to rely on the ffw editing feature

@Chris: done, thanks for the feedback.

@AliKouhzadi: Glad you like it!

An even simpler example of showing how productive you can be with C++ AMP is our "Hello World" example. We also have learning guides for those familiar with other programming models, please get them here: CUDA, OpenCL, DirectCompute. 

The performance is comparable between all these approaches, and in our tests is not a factor for choosing one over the other, even now that the product is in Beta and we are still tuning the bits. Once we RTM, we invite anyone to measure the performance difference between C++ AMP and any other approach and share their workloads and results on a variety of hardware for comparison.

@Granville Barnett: Yes, when I said "yes we think so" it was in response to Charles' comment/question which included the words "modern" and "true" C++ API, so any response to that will be subjective given the vagueness of those terms in this context. So while I may believe that C++ AMP is the first truly modern C++ API for heterogeneous computing and that it is "better" than similar approaches (I am slightly biased ), so please evaluate alternative approaches and judge for yourself. Thanks for bringing this up.