Understanding AMD’s Mantle: A Low-Level Graphics API For GCN

Wrapping up our AMD product showcase coverage, AMD’s final announcement of the day was a very brief announcement about a new API called Mantle. Mantle is something of an enigma at this point – AMD isn’t saying a whole lot until November with the AMD Developer Summit – and although it’s conceptually simple, the real challenge is trying to understand where it fits into AMD’s product strategy, and perhaps more importantly what brought them to this point in the first place. So although we don’t have all of the necessary details in hand quite yet, we wanted to spend some time breaking down the matters surrounding Mantle as much as we reasonably can.