Tag Archive for 'OpenCL'

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.