The course will start with an overview of how you can analyze code in terms of kinds of work, and identify where C++AMP might be useful. We’ll talk about why C++AMP is useful for taking full advantage of modern computing systems, and how you can begin to use C++AMP constructs in your existing code. We’ll also compare C++AMP to other popular heterogeneous computing models, so that you can see the tradeoffs associated with each. Then we’re going to cover the abstractions available in C++AMP for managing the accelerator devices themselves. Once an application has a handle on the device it wants to use for computation, it will also need to express data collections and data indexes, possibly in multiple dimensions.

In this course you’ll learn about how accelerator hardware is designed and integrated into the system. With that foundation, we can start talking about what you can expect from the system when you use various C++AMP features. Specifically, we will talk about data transfers to and from the accelerator, memory layout and memory accesses from the accelerator, and thread execution and control flow on the accelerator. Then we’ll cover what support Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2012 has for C++ AMP.