Apple to Add Dedicated Video Hardware to Macs?

[xbjllb]

An explosion of media? I'm liking that.

That's totally valid, but then why isn't there Blu-ray in the Mac Pros and/or iMacs? 4/8 cores should be enough.

So I'm thinking the absence of Blu-ray in Macs is mainly from another reason.

It's simple... you can't put blu-ray into an iPod or iPhone... haven't you heard Apple is sneaking out of the desktop business?

 

[mdriftmeyer]

New flash! Apple has had such chips built-in ever since they began shipping Macs with real video cards. ATI has been using their GPUs to encode video since 2005 (Avivo).

This article makes no sense. Why would Apple invest in OpenCL (to expose existing GPU resources), and then turn their back on it to develop yet another alternative?

News flash: the chips won't be dedicated h.264 chipsets. H.264 HD will be one piece of functionality.

If you want a real discussion on the implications:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=89701

 

[guzhogi]

Not going to happen. No way, no how. It makes no sense either economically or as a potential feature. Core 2 processors combined with modern, low-end GPUs can already handle HD content for decode and their just isn't enough need to do HD encoding in real-time or anything even approaching realtime (for the average user).

Beside that, with next year's Core i7 processors, embedded GPUs, OpenCL, and Grand Central there won't be any need for this rumored, dedicated, hardware-based H.264 acceleration. Apple isn't going to introduce a completely new and costly hardware architecture that will be obsolete and/or unnecessary in less than a year.

Very good points. However, for the people doing HD encoding, there may quite a fe people who use iMovie a bit & it'll help. As for Core i7, OpenCL, et al, maybe Apple's going to just start working on the encoder/decoder w/ those things in mind. That way, we could make the most out of them plus they'd be pretty close to real-time when they come out.

On a side note, a few years ago, I was just thinking about OpenGL, OpenAL, and wondered what other Open(whatever)Ls there are and found OpenRL, made by this company called Aspex-Semi. Aspex designs h.264 encoders/decoders so maybe Apple can buy that up, too or something. Just my 2¢

 

[theBB]

Lets take your example and extrapolate: "Incidentally, H.264 is one of the codecs used in Blu-Ray high definition video discs installed in computers and used in homes which Apple has yet to adopt." - So Apple has yet to adopt homes? The which follows homes.

As Apple is not yet to adopt homes, that is a good example of bad usage. "Which" has to follow the object being described, very simple really... If you want it to describe the subject of this sentence instead, you have to reconstruct the sentence, so that "which" follows H.264 somehow.

If you've been writing sentences using "which" at the end of the sentence in the belief that it still describes the subject of the sentence no matter how many phrases come between them, you've been wrong all along.

I am not that picky about grammar, but if you are gonna go about dissing the authors, I think you should read up a bit more about this.