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OpenCL Specification Completed in Record Time for Snow Leopard

"OpenCL is an amazing new feature of OSX. ...Which is why I'm so excited today to ignore that and show you the watered down iPhone version!"

In seriousness, the ghosts of future past, present, and future, would have to give him one hell of a visit for that to possibly not happen :p
 
grabberslasher said:
OpenCL is not mostly CUDA, it's a multi-device framework that taps into the programmable GPUs on all sides and other physics processors and CPUs available in the system.

While OpenCL and CUDA do similar things on the same part of silicon on the Nvidia boards, they're not the same code. It's meant to be *much* grander than CUDA alone.
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Actually, OpenCL is mostly based on CUDA with some Apple people doing some nifty dynamic compilation on top.

CUDA has been ported to the CPU as well to NVIDIA GPUS (and ATIs are getting there). Basically they are going to be doing super-threading algorithms that can run on any streaming device, or on a normal device that is not as fast but does not break the programming model so it can scale across different cores in the system (from different vendors, but it is geared towards NVIDIA initially)

Although, I always get a kick about working in a project and getting corrected from an outside source :) hint.. hint...
 
inkswamp said:
Um, since when does Steve Jobs talk about Macs at Macworld anyway?

(I kid. I kid... sorta.)
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Introduced the MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Apple TV Take 2, iTunes Movie rentals. iPhone firmware update.

I take your point! But the DC in WWDC hints, just as MW in MWSF. Hopefully this years MWSF can be a bit more World of Mac-esque. (Liveblog from Gizmodo - how it wasn't the best of keynotes (partly due to all the rumours being spot on and spoiling the surprise in a way)).
 
PeterQC said:
I'm sure it will have the exact opposite effect. Just look at what happened with the Air in video decoding with the new version: Lot of the encoding was transfered to the GPU and now the Air run a lot more cooler when viewing flash videos and movies. Now think about it, but for everything you do.
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It depends on how it's used, but right now power consumption is limited by the fact that the hardware is used very inefficiently. OpenCL and Grand Central will mean that all CPU cores and graphics cores will be able to run at a much higher load-- and that will get hotter. It got cooler doing the video decode because it's running on the GPU instead of the CPU.

If you're doing the same thing more efficiently it will get cooler, if you're doing more things more efficiently it'll get hotter but as someone above said, that's progress.
Nano-tube said:
I believe that OpenCL will accelerate only specific tasks.
Though I am very curious to see what it will actually achieve, I am holding my fingers crossed for a 10% to 15% increase in OpenCL supported tasks.
I think it will be a respectable boost.
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You're right that it'll be most effective for certain types of very parallel tasks, but the potential gains are much greater than that:
Mathematica and CUDA
Wolfram is reporting that Mathematica is seeing a 900-9900% increase from CUDA. Granted Mathematica is essentially the perfect application for GPU acceleration, but that gives you an upper bound at least.
m1stake said:
Not really. D3D and OpenGL are the two big standards, they do compete. The same is true of Windows and OSX, which arguably are aimed at different goals.
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Snarkiness aside, my point was that by saying the state of OpenGL doesn't matter because everybody plays games on Windows you are saying that OpenGL is only useful for playing games.
 
Then we can agree that it's good for making a pretty desktop background and maybe booting as well :p

I suppose I'd have a stronger point if I changed OpenGL to OSX. OSX has obviously not been built with games in mind because of the FPS difference between OSX verions and PC versions. While this is OpenGL's fault, Apple hasn't done a fantastic job with their implementation anyway, or their graphics drivers. Blame for everyone!
 
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