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Apple to Support Nvidia's CUDA at WWDC?

CNet interviewed Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and found that Apple may have an interest in Nvidia's CUDA technology:

CUDA is a programming technology that allows software developers to take advantage of the unique parallel processing characteristics of graphics processors such as Nvidia's GeForce 8600M, found in the MacBook Pro.

According to Huang, "Apple knows a lot about CUDA" and may announce support for the technology at next week's' Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

During a demo for CNet, Nvidia engineers demonstrated how a CUDA-enabled version of a program could dramatically speed up converting video from one format to another. Transcoding video can be useful to convert existing video to be played on another device (such as the iPhone).

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48 months ago
I just read this on CNet (might be old news to most by now but hey why not :) ) and thought it was pretty cool.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9962117-37.html?tag=nefd.top

This would be awesome if they could leverage GPU power for Quicktime encodes/transcodes. I wonder if Tyler from Visual Hub would be able to use it to speed up Visual Hub's encoding even more ;)

EDIT: Sorry if this is in the wrong section as well, Mods please move if I fubar'd it :)
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48 months ago

I just read this on CNet (might be old news to most by now but hey why not :) ) and thought it was pretty cool.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9962117-37.html?tag=nefd.top

This would be awesome if they could leverage GPU power for Quicktime encodes/transcodes. I wonder if Tyler from Visual Hub would be able to use it to speed up Visual Hub's encoding even more ;)

EDIT: Sorry if this is in the wrong section as well, Mods please move if I fubar'd it :)


Yes, it is available in Mac OS X. Not sure what the point of the post is though?

CUDA is a pretty impressive technology if you are doing lots of maths heavy programming but because it is pretty limited (only Nvidia hardware for a start with more than 128MBs of graphics RAM) it's use is limited to a small section of the Mac community.
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48 months ago

Yes, it is available in Mac OS X. Not sure what the point of the post is though?


Was more to see what other people thought about it. From what you have said it seems like it is already implemented? Do you know any applications that are actively using it?

CUDA is a pretty impressive technology if you are doing lots of maths heavy programming but because it is pretty limited (only Nvidia hardware for a start with more than 128MBs of graphics RAM) it's use is limited to a small section of the Mac community.


This is more where I was wanting to get into, given the increasing performance of hardware more people would be opened up to these sort of areas so it would be interesting to see how current developers envisage their ability to leverage the technology today. Seeing that even the X3100 in the current MacBook's can utilize 144Mb of RAM quite a few machines would be able to use it, if only a little bit (I'm not to clued in on the details of the memory requirements beyond what you've mentioned I admit), for a little bump in encoding speed.

Apologies if this doesn't make much sense either, working early on a Saturday morning has its draw backs :)
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48 months ago
So is this something that could be included in a leopard update?
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48 months ago
Only 8600?
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48 months ago

Only 8600?


Here's a full list of supported GPUs.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html

arn
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48 months ago
Ah.So there could be a firmware update for the MacPro 8800 video card.
Man. Cuda combined with the 8-cores would make video a breeze.
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48 months ago
hey, i'll take a speed increase on converting my videos
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48 months ago
So then will Apple start offering more powerful video cards, at least as a bto? They're a little better now, but there is tons of room for improvement.

Perhaps they could even end the (mostly true) stereotype that Macs suck at gaming.:p
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48 months ago

So then will Apple start offering more powerful video cards, at least as a bto? They're a little better now, but there is tons of room for improvement.

Perhaps they could even end the (mostly true) stereotype that Macs suck at gaming.:p


I know really, why can't apple use any decent graphic cards anymore:(
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