Our thoughts on the iPad for gaming, a mobile replacement and a paradigm shift in computing. Continue reading ‘iPad’
Tag Archive for 'Apple'
Every now and then I look at the range of Macs you can buy. I weigh up the pros and cons of owning a laptop on a stand iMac. I look at the laptops, usually reasonably priced, but I don’t need their portability. I look over the the Mini, the cheapest Mac, but gasp at the paltry and expensive specifications. As always, I decide on the Mac Pro. It’s the only Mac that can be expanded beyond memory and hard drive. It’s the obvious choice for gaming, but the barrier is cost. Your ticket to upgradeability? £1899.
Aleks Krotoski from the Guardian interviewed Brian Greenstone at this year’s SXSWi on the success of Enigmo on the iPhone.
The eternal question: what is a Mac?
What makes a Mac a Mac? The combination of OS X and Apple hardware? That’s the current idea of a Mac, but what if you could run OS X on generic PC components easily - no hacking, no breaking of the EULA? Would this mean you could be a Mac user and a Mac gamer for around the same price as a PC gamer? No £2000 for a gaming machine from Apple?
News has been slow, deathly slow of late, but I have a surprise. Sadly it’s looking like it won’t be a Christmas surprise, but hopefully a New year surprise.
I shudder to think what images are being conjured in your mind: a naked me, running, flailing, as security from Apple’s HQ try and knock me to the ground?
Nah? Just me? I’ll get my coat…
Missed this one. Two days ago the OpenCL 1.0 Specification was announced and ratified:
“The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable compute and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of cooperation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA. “As an open, cross-platform standard, OpenCL is a fundamental technology for next generation software development that will play a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem and we look forward to seeing implementations within the next year.”
“We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple developed OpenCL so that any application in Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, can harness an amazing amount of computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”
In a nutshell, your GPU will be used for more general purpose calculations. Snow Leopard will take advantage of this from the ground up, meaning applications and the OS should be faster. Things like encoding movies should be super fast - down from a couple hours to minutes.
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