Hopefully by now you have heard of C++ AMP. C++ AMP is a modern C++ library (plus a key new language feature) that ships with Visual Studio 2012 and it lets you take advantage of accelerators, such as the GPU, for compute purposes. Think data parallelism, but at a massive level, accelerated by powerful hardware. If you need more motivation on how using C++ AMP can speed up code, check out the nbody or the morph demo.

To follow the C++ AMP story, you should subscribe to the Parallel Programming in Native Code blog. Over the last year we have published (and updated for RTM) a number of Visual Studio sample projects, links to complementary open source libraries, and of course the C++ AMP open specification that any vendor can implement, so they can offer C++ AMP on other non-Microsoft platforms. If you have questions on C++ AMP, we welcome them at our MSDN forum.

In addition, this week we published on our blog two collections of links worth sharing more broadly

1. “Learn C++ AMP” is for you if you are a total C++ AMP newbie and have now decided to take the plunge.
2. “Present on C++ AMP” will help you give a presentation on C++ AMP, which I know some of you need to do even if you are not experts on a technology – we’ve got you covered.

Finally, if you already feel comfortable with C++ AMP, you can prove your skills and also win software and hardware by taking part in the C++ AMP coding contest.