Industry Group to Establish OpenCL Standard
The group will specifically evaluate and establish Apple's proposed Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification. OpenCL aims "to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language." The press release gives us a broader overview of what OpenCL is trying to accomplish:
A widely available open-standard compute programming specification with high-performance, general computation support and robust numerics will complement existing solutions and further liberate GPU-based compute power from the realm of graphics-only applications and provide a multi-vendor, portable interface for coordinating all the many-core GPUs and multi-core CPUs within a system. Such capability will have broad applicability - including a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem by providing a powerful compute front-end to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, and a platform for accelerating tasks such as physics and image processing / recognition.
The Khronos Group is also responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards as well as many others.At WWDC, Apple first announced its plans to introduce performance enhancing technologies into their next version of Mac OS X (Snow Leopard). The technologies included "Grand Central" and "OpenCL" which promise to improve computer performance by taking advantage of modern multi-core processors as well as the GPUs found on modern video cards.
According to the president of the Khronos group, this technology could be used in both desktop and handheld devices in the future.
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Let's hope that this means that the performance improvements will justify the likely $130 upgrade.
If it doesn't, then there is now need to buy it. If you have a MacBook and don't need/want native Exchange support in Mail.app and Leopard is stable for you, i don't see a reason to upgrade. There won't be many new end-user features—adn the main ones may find their way into Leopard—and the OpenCL and Grand Central won't do much for a dual core system with an integrated graphics card and no more than 4GB RAM.
Nice to see ATI and Nvidia jump in early with their support. Of course, if this pans out and gets adopted as a standard they both stand to sell lots of higher end video cards as computing power enhancements, instead of just to gamers.
Everyone stands to benefit with Open CL development; Apple, Intel, ATI, NVidia, and most significantly, the consumer and pro given the greatly enhanced boost in productivity. It is wonderful to witness the evolution of core processing, and greater still to be able to actually utilize all cores to their full potential with all applications and processes. This alone would justify a $130 upgrade, as would the integration of a bootable read/write ZFS. Already looking forward to MW 2009, and all of the iPhone apps which will be introduced along the way. Snow Leopard seems to be becoming a major upgrade to an already solid OS, as Open CL further evokes collaboration from all ends toward the common goals of efficiency, enhanced performance, and power.
Two rival chip makers are about to deliver the next advance in technology to improve the realism of videogames. But this time their efforts could have a broader impact.
AMD seems on board
The GPU makers are addressing the software challenge. Nvidia has an internally developed programming scheme called CUDA; AMD plans to use a programming technology called OpenCL that Apple Inc. and other companies are backing.
http://macdaddyworld.com/2008/06/15/wwdc-the-line/
The things I saw this week at WWDC made my eyes bug out. They’re determined to squeeze every last cycle out of the CPU (and the GPU for that matter), constantly asking the question “How can we make this faster?”.
....
Until now, efficiently and properly taking advantage of all available cores has been a tricky and error-prone process even for the most brilliant of engineers. Snow Leopard will solve this problem in many ways, with new language features, and a new operation paradigm which shifts the burden of threaded programming away from the developer and into the capable hands of the OS.
waits for microsoft to jump on board.
Microsoft generally only joins standards groups in order to coopt and destroy from within.
Microsoft generally only joins standards groups in order to coopt and destroy from within.
Lets hope they do their own standard and not do it properly and then the performance factor between the 2 different OS's will increase due to MS's arrogance.
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