AMD released the first public beta of AMD CodeXL - a new unified developer tool suite that is designed to enable easier software development on heterogeneous computing platforms.

The first version of the suite includes a GPU debugger, CPU and GPU profilers and a static GPU performance analyzer - all of this is available as a Visual Studio plugin and as standalone application on Windows and Linux.

Between now and the final 1.0 release, AMD will be updating AMD CodeXL based on developers' feedback. The current beta version supports a limited set of Windows and Linux targets, but the subsequent versions in the coming weeks will add support for other OS platforms.

Key highlights of AMD CodeXL beta include:

- GPU Debugger - provides a debugging on AMD APUs/GPUs with OpenCL, OpenGL API calls and OpenCL kernels. It allows you to step through real-time OpenCL kernels from API calls, put breakpoints and debug inside the kernel, view all variable values and track API call histories - all on a single computer with a single GPU.

- CPU Profiler - a profiling suite that helps you to identify, investigate and tune application performance on AMD CPUs. It finds time critical hotspots in your code precisely with time-based, event-based and instruction-based sampling, and also allows you to narrow profiling to single process and capture profiling data for OpenCL codes running on the CPU. In addition, call graph profiling provides a butterfly view of your function calls with the trace history.

- GPU Profiler - a complete GPU profiler that you can use to discover bottlenecks in your OpenCL and DirectCompute applications, and find ways to improve performance on AMD APUs/GPUs. It collects and visualizes GPU counter data, application trace, kernel occupancy and hotspot analysis, with comprehensive timeline and summary views of host, kernel and data transfers in between.

- Static Analyzer - a utility to analyze your OpenCL application statically, without having to run on the actual hardware. It enables you to compile, analyze and disassemble your OpenCL code, estimate accurate performance of kernels and view disassembly of the generated hardware kernel.

"We believe AMD CodeXL is a key stepping stone to developing truly powerful heterogeneous compute applications that harness AMD?s platform innovations," said Milind Kukanur, Sr. Manager, Product Management at AMD. "Developers are enabled to quickly and easily debug, profile, and analyze their applications and achieve maximum performance on AMD APUs, GPUs and CPUs. In the near future we plan to add support for heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) as it is a key part of our commitment to provide complete HSA solutions."