AMD APP SDK v2.4 released

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Finally, they released it. The long awaited SDK that should patch all Bugs. Guess what: not a single Bug fixed!

Here are the unresolved issues that are related to oclHashcat:

Most Important:

The ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5970 GPU is currently supported in single-GPU mode only. It is recommended users only access the first device on an ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5970 GPU for GPU compute.

Well this is a Problem for oclHashcat, but we have that hack, that hidden environment variable "GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS". Using it we are able to utilize the 2nd GPU fully. It has been tested several times. It works fine. However its inofficial.

Semi Important:

• bitselect() still not mapped to BFI_INT. Thats sad, would save me a lot of work. So that means i still have to hack the BFI_INT instructions into the binaries.
  
• clGetDeviceInfo CL_DEVICE_MAX_CLOCK_FREQUENCY returns 0mhz, sometimes i've seen 1mhz. Its not listed in the in the release notes, but its still there.
  

• The OpenCL runtime currently exposes less than the total amount of memory physically available on the card

Last but not least, SDK v2.4 had something usefull:

• Added support for BeaverCreek, Caicos, Turks and WinterPark GPUs.
  

Some additionally notes from me. In the developer release notes they say:

AMD APP intends to deprecate the following as of SDK 2.5:
– AMD CAL
– Support for the Windows XP platform
– BIF 1.0 (the binary format prior to SDK 2.2)

All of the following points are interessting from our view:

• Kick out CAL? I guess some guys in the GPGPU scene really do not like to read this! Just to name some of them: IGHASHGPU, KK, Fenix or calpp version of Pyrit base on it.
  
• Kick out Windows XP support. Thats not so bad however i know some Hashcat users still use XP. Guys, upgrade to Win7 or Linux
  
• Kick out BIF 1.0. Well thats a problem for oclHashcat. They all use the binary format. But I hope they stick at least to ELF. At least that means new releases of all oclHashcats after AMD releases SDK 2.5
  

Also it seems they finally renamed that ATI to AMD in the SDK. That means, on Linux, you have to replace the files from the ICD registration on /etc/OpenCL/vendors. Remove the old ones and unpack the icd-registration.tgz in the SDK 2.4.

Thats all from my first impressions. However it will not prevent me from releasing oclHashcat-lite. I guess on weekend

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