Looking to encourage application builders to readily integrate multi-threading capabilities into their applications, AMD is making its performance library available for free as the Framewave open source project. The library is a collection of more than 3,200 routines that optimize performance of media-oriented applications on multi-core chips.
By starting an open source project the chipmaker will allow programmers to develop, customize and further optimize a new base of open source software routines, which can then be plugged into future applications. What's more, the project is not intended to be limited to AMD processors as the routines used could apply to processors from other vendors as well.
Just because a project is open to participation doesn't always mean that everyone participates, though. Intel themselves open sourced its Threading Building Blocks (TBB) technology last year to help developers produce multithreaded code, but has yet to see any feedback or contributions from AMD. In any case, developers stand to do nothing but benefit enormously from these specs being opened.