Aviary focuses on Windows 8 with new AMD partnership

The photo-editing toolkit Aviary and chipmaker AMD announced today they’re partnering to give Windows 8 users and developers a better, faster set of photo-editing tools and features.

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AMD Ventures put an undisclosed amount into the software startup, which enabled the development of Aviary’s new Windows 8 SDK that will “take advantage of unique AMD APU [accelerated processor unit] architectural advantages,” said company reps in a statement on the news.

Also, Aviary rolled out its first Windows 8. Aviary also has released its first Windows 8 app to show off the SDK, dog-food style.

Win8 developers will get access to a library of effects and filters for photo editing using the new Microsoft language C++ AMP.

That last bit stands for Accelerated Massive Parallelism and allows for computations to be performed in parallel on the graphics processing unit (GPU) cores inside the AMD chips instead of the central processing unit (CPU) cores. AMD says the whole shebang adds up to 16x-speed increases in processing photo editing changes. Hence the performance enhancements Aviary is so excited about today.

Aviary’s Photo Editor for Windows 8 is currently available in the Windows Store. With its current lineup of developer tools and consumer apps, the company says it’s processed 3 billion images from 35 million users to date.