AMD Fire Stream - Limitations

Limitations

  • Recursive functions are not supported in Brook+ because all function calls are inlined at compile time. Using CAL, functions (recursive or otherwise) are supported to 32 levels.
  • Only bilinear texture filtering is supported; mipmapped textures and anisotropic filtering are not supported at this time.
  • Various deviations from the IEEE 754 standard. Denormal numbers and signaling NaNs are not supported; the rounding mode cannot be changed, and the precision of division/square root is slightly lower than single-precision.
  • Functions cannot have a variable number of arguments. The same problem occurs for recursive functions.
  • Conversion of floating-point numbers to integers on GPUs is done differently than on x86 CPUs; it is not fully IEEE-754 compliant.
  • Doing "global synchronization" on the GPU is not very efficient, which forces the GPU to divide the kernel and do synchronization on the CPU. Given the variable number of multiprocessors and other factors, there may not be a perfect solution to this problem.
  • The bus bandwidth and latency between the CPU and the GPU may become a bottleneck, which may be alleviated in the future by introducing interconnects with higher bandwidth.

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