New in Version 2.5

• Support for AMD APP SDK v2.7.
• Support for OpenCL™ 1.2.
• Support for collecting performance counters on APU devices.
• Full support for profiling with AMD Radeon™ HD7000 series GPUs based on Graphics Core Next/Southern Islands:
  • Added support for kernel occupancy analysis.
  • Added support for collecting performance counters for DirectCompute (DirectX 11) applications.
  • Addition of SALUBusy counter.
  • Fixed value reported for VALUBusy counter.
  • The values reported for LDSFetchInsts and LDSWriteInsts counters were inaccurate on AMD Radeon™ HD7000 series GPUs; thus for those GPUs, those two counters have been replaced by a single LDSInsts counter.
  • Fixed display of kernel ISA.
• Improved OpenCL™ analysis module:
  • Added detection of deprecated OpenCL™ APIs.
• Added support for showing source and destination location, as well as zero-copy status for memory transfers initiated using clEnqueueMapBuffer or clEnqueueMapImage. This information is displayed in the API Trace view.
• Added support for Microsoft® Visual Studio® projects that use User-defined Macros in the project settings.
• Fixed the –workingdirectory (-w) command line switch (set current directory) on Linux.
• Fixed some problems with importing previously-generated profile results into Microsoft® Visual Studio®.
• Changed the default installation directory on Windows to %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\AMD\AMD APP Profiler to make it more consistent with other AMD tools (i.e gDEBugger and CodeAnalyst)

Getting Started

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows Vista or 7 (32 bit/64 bit) or Linux 32-bit/64-bit
• [Optional] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 (Standard/Professional/Team System Edition)
• To profile OpenCL™ applications:
  • AMD APP SDK v2.7 or later
  • [GPU device] AMD Catalyst with OpenCL™ GPU support (12.4 or newer)
  • [GPU device] AMD Radeon™ HD 4000 series or newer
• To profile DirectCompute applications:
  • Microsoft DirectX run-time (June 2010 or later)
  • AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 series or newer

Features

• Collect OpenCL™ Application Trace
  • View and debug the input parameters and output results for all OpenCL™ API calls
  • Search the API calls
  • Navigate to the source code that called an OpenCL™ API
  • Specify which OpenCL™ APIs will be traced
• Collect GPU Performance Counters of AMD Radeon™ graphics cards
  • Show kernel resource usages
  • Show the number of instructions executed by the GPU
  • Show the GPU utilization
  • Show the GPU memory access characteristics
  • Measure kernel execution time
• OpenCL™ Timeline visualization
  • Visualize the application high level structure
  • Visualize kernel execution and data transfer operations
  • Visualize host code execution
  • Annotate host code in the timeline with performance markers using the included CLPerfMarkerAMD library
• OpenCL™ Application Summary pages
  • Find incorrect or inefficient usage of the OpenCL™ API using the OpenCL™ analysis module
  • Find the API hotspots
  • Find the bottleneck between kernel execution and data transfer operations
  • Find the top 10 data transfer and kernel execution operations
• OpenCL™ Kernel Occupancy Viewer
  • Calculates and displays a kernel occupancy number, which estimates the number of in-flight wavefronts on a compute unit as a percentage of the theoretical maximum number of wavefronts that the compute unit can support
  • Find out which kernel resource (GPR usage, LDS size, or Work-group size) is currently limiting the number of in-flight wavefronts
  • Displays graphs showing how kernel occupancy would be affected by changes in each kernel resource
• Display the AMD IL and ISA (hardware disassembly) code of the kernel for OpenCL™ kernels and DXASM code for DirectCompute kernels.

Support

• AMD APP Profiler Knowledge Base
• GPU Developer Tool Forum

Resources

• AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing OpenCL Programming Guide
• AMD APP Profiler’s article at Siggraph 2010
• AMD OpenCL™ Zone