Stefan Mileschin

As part of a larger Mantle promotion, AMD has posted a number of blogs on their site detailing their low level API. The blog posts themselves are unabashedly closer to advertising than technical writing, but as something of a diamond in the rough AMD has also published a whitepaper on Mantle.

At 11 pages long the Mantle whitepaper offers a solid high level overview of the technology. In it AMD delves into further detail about several aspects of the API, without getting buried in the minutia of an API in a way that only seasoned programmers can appreciate. Among the subjects covered are Mantle's memory model, execution model, pipeline model, and the basic tenants of where low-level APIs can reduce overhead and improve performance over high level APIs.

The bulk of this information is a repeat from AMD’s earlier developer presentations, so we won’t spend any time going over the materials in-depth here, but for a more approachable look at the API from AMD’s perspective this is a great start.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8074/a...tle-whitepaper