Snow Leopard's Grand Central and OpenCL Details?
Roughly Drafted provides a birds-eye view of the key technologies coming in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. While Apple's press release and later comments by Steve Jobs provide hints of what Grand Central and OpenCL are planning to accomplish, this article adds a few extra details.
According to the article, Apple's Grand Central is a new thread management architecture which simplifies the developer's task to support multi-threading:
Snow Leopards Grand Central Dispatch does the same thing [as modern networking] for processes, packetizing tasks into Blocks and routing them to available processing cores as efficiently as possible. It can also manage the big picture for the whole system, adjusting how it balances its tasks as the performance load increases. This would be close to impossible for Individual developers to do themselves.
With the recent trend towards multi-core CPUs, exploiting multi-threaded designs is required to take advantage of today's processors. As expected, OpenCL will allow developers to also pass off tasks to the computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). However, it appears OpenCL code will be stored as bytecode to allow for just-in-time compilation (same as Core Image) allowing applications to be specifically optimized to the graphics hardware it is being run on. Similarly, Grand Central will oversee OpenCL tasks as well, to optimally route code to the best available processor.
Apple expects to ship the final version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard in "about a year".
Popular Stories
With around four months to go before Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 14 lineup, the overwhelming majority of rumors related to the new devices so far have focused on the iPhone 14 Pro, rather than the standard iPhone 14 – leading to questions about how different the iPhone 14 will actually be from its predecessor, the iPhone 13.
The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max are expected...
The iPhone 14 will feature a more expensive "high-end" front-facing camera with autofocus, partly made in South Korea for the first time, ET News reports.
Apple reportedly ousted a Chinese candidate to choose LG Innotek, a South Korean company, to supply the iPhone 14's front-facing camera alongside Japan's Sharp. The company is said to have originally planned to switch to LG for the iPhone...
Last year's iPhone 13 Pro models were the first of Apple's smartphones to come with 120Hz ProMotion displays, and while the two iPhone 14 Pro models will continue to feature the technology, their screens could well boast expanded refresh rate variability this time round.
To bring ProMotion displays to the iPhone 13 Pro models, Apple adopted LTPO panel technology with variable refresh...
Apple has silently increased the price of its Apple Music subscription for college students in several countries, with the company emailing students informing them their subscription would be slightly increasing in price moving forward. The price change is not widespread and, based on MacRumors' findings, will impact Apple Music student subscribers in but not limited to Australia, the...
Apple is one of several companies that have held talks with Electronic Arts (EA) about a potential purchase, according to a new report from Puck.
EA has spoken to several "potential suitors," including Apple, Amazon, and Disney as it looks for a merger arrangement. Apple and the other companies declined to comment, and the status of the talks is not known at this time, but Apple does have an ...
Sony this week came out with an updated version of its popular over-ear noise canceling headphones, so we picked up a pair to compare them to the AirPods Max to see which headphones are better and whether it's worth buying the $400 WH-1000XM5 from Sony over Apple's $549 AirPods Max.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. First of all, the AirPods Max win out when it comes ...