Industry Group to Establish OpenCL Standard

[MacRumors]

The Khronos Group, a member-funded consortium focused on establishing open standard application programming interfaces (APIs), has announced the formation of the "Compute Working Group" to focus on open standards for parallel computing across graphics processing units (GPUs) and CPUs. Apple, AMD (ATI) and Nvidia are amongst the initial members.

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."

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.

Article Link

 

[Zwhaler]

Let's hope that this means that the performance improvements will justify the likely $130 upgrade.

 

[Peel]

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.

 

[furious]

waits for microsoft to jump on board.

 

[fuziwuzi]

the current high end video cards draw too much power, upto 235w for the new nvidia gt200 gpus.

 

[solipsism]

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.

 

[DMann]

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.

 

[arn]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121358204084776309.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox

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.

 

[arn]

A developer on Snow Leopard

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.

 

[bigwig]

waits for microsoft to jump on board.

Microsoft generally only joins standards groups in order to coopt and destroy from within.

 

[CrackedButter]

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.

 

[BornAgainMac]

I am curious if Windows will get this technology with perhaps a third party vendor if Microsoft doesn't do it. I can see that platform really being left behind if they don't do it.

 

[furious]

Microsoft generally only joins standards groups in order to coopt and destroy from within.

kinda my point.

 

[gnasher729]

With the kind of performance potential that using the GPU can give you, there will be lots of customers in need of serious floating point performance who don't care or don't care very much what operating system a computer has, only whether it supports OpenCL or not. If that works out, then Apple will sell an awful lot of MacPro's and AMD / NVidia will sell an awful lot of GPUs going into these MacPro's.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

MS....
Standards ......

Shame on ya'll fer puttin those 2 words in the same sentence

me thinks the only standards they have managed to conform to is bloatware, discombobulation, and greedscum.......

But great news for everyone else !

 

[137489]

MS....
Standards ......

Shame on ya'll fer puttin those 2 words in the same sentence

me thinks the only standards they have managed to conform to is bloatware, discombobulation, and greedscum.......

But great news for everyone else !

Yep, I remember about 7 years back I went to a conference on developing websites (mostly with client side computing - although they touched a bit on srever side). There they demo's a bunch of the newest technology (dreamweaver, MS Front Page, Java Script, and a few others).

They showed us all the HTML code that was created by these apps, then for 15 min they went over the code. They pointed out that while (at the time) front page was the easiest to use to get websites up quickly - the code was not standard. they also said to stay away from DHTML, which was created by MS. The instructures put every bell and whistle that front page offered and created a beautiful site in minutes - then demontrstated how 90% of the webrowsers at that time crashed trying to run it. Even Internet Explorer had some trouble at times. the instructor then brought up the W3C consortium that sets the standards for the internet - half if not more of the code that front page developed was not standard.

It is still even true to this day with any of their website creation software. that is why in web essentials and silver light, they took away alot of what we loved (easy navagation menues, blogs [kinda blew my mind - the web these days is 80% blogs)], guest books, proto albums, slide shows)

 

[mbene12]

I am more than a little skeptical that this will impact the majority of programs. I have done some programming with CUDA and the way you have to mash things around to fit in the registers and actually utilize more than a small fraction of the GPU makes this unlikely to be generally useful.

It is more likely that systems with a large number of cores (8 or more) will see some significant benefit, but I dont know how long it will be until more than 4 cores are standard on the desktop. I think 2 is gonna be most common for some time to come.

 

[137489]

I am more than a little skeptical that this will impact the majority of programs. I have done some programming with CUDA and the way you have to mash things around to fit in the registers and actually utilize more than a small fraction of the GPU makes this unlikely to be generally useful.

It is more likely that systems with a large number of cores (8 or more) will see some significant benefit, but I dont know how long it will be until more than 4 cores are standard on the desktop. I think 2 is gonna be most common for some time to come.

I think any improvement to make apps and files load quicker will be good. i do not know how many times I had to wait for that hour glass in Windows. Only twice did I get the beachball on Apple, but I did have a lot of apps open and was trying to load a 700mb file into one of the apps.

90% of my time wasted is for files to load. I just thank God that the apps on the Apple side are so intuitive that they are small, contained in one file (for the most part) and are packed with features that make even the more prominent Windows users say wow. On the Windows side, you have DLL's spread all over the place. I think the more we can off load to other cores and processors the better (I remember the days when my largest file would not even fill a 5 1/4-in floppy 720 kb). Now, with files sizes being in the megebytes to gigabites - the quicker we can get them to load the better.

 

[137489]

I am curious if Windows will get this technology with perhaps a third party vendor if Microsoft doesn't do it. I can see that platform really being left behind if they don't do it.

Oh I agree, but isn't that Apple's whole point - to leave MS in the dust....

But seriously, in one way I do hope so - especially for servers. Ever try to work with MS SQL, where 50,000 - 100,000 or more rows are being imported daily. Sometimes it just takes too long for a query to run against all that data... and I am not even working with complex queries; sometimes I have to limit it to "show me just a couple of hours worth of data". Part of the problem is the SQLSERVR.EXE and SQLAGENT, shows that it is just eating up CPU and memory if you look in the task manager.

 

[gbrandt]

I've been on a Khronos commitee. There are alot of smart people on these committees (I fluked into it) that know what they are doing and what the companies represent want.

What this ends up being is a design by committee, and in my experience this does not always end up creating the best API and typically is not on time!

I think we may be lucky to have a finalized OpenCL within a year, which would be the timeframe to get it into Snow Leopard.

Gregor

 

[BongoBanger]

Are Intel involved?

As for MS, they have Direct X so I doubt they care.

 

[BenRoethig]

Considering that the OpenGL can't seem to agree on anything and are usually molasses slow, I don't know that this is a good think.

 

[Bubba Satori]

Hopefully this means they'll stop flogging old, last generation or two video cards at premium prices.

 

[velocityg4]

I wonder if this will mean dedicated GPU's across the board again? Though it could be in preparation for Intel's GPU/CPU integration due in 2009 with Havendale and Auburndale. Though not considered a true GPU it is close.

Then perhaps the mini may actually be refreshed in 2009. Hopefully before then.

 

[alphaod]

OpenGL is a lot easier to program than anything else me thinks.