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OpenCL Specification Completed in Record Time for Snow Leopard
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Well it's too bad games arn't still mostly on OpenGL, we could have good ports of games to mac easily, but with everything now on D3D, there will have to be 2 distinctive versions of games, which means no getting rid of bootcamp anytime soon.
I doubt it. The point of OpenCL and Grand Central is that you don't need Crossfire or SLI. These technologies are only useful for graphics rendering in games since games need to see a single combined GPU. GPGPU functions and OpenCL don't care if you have many slow GPUs or 1 big combined GPU. In fact, SLI and Crossfire would probably be detrimental because of wasted overhead. Instead, Grand Central will assign individual tasks to each separate GPU.
Now this won't help raw fps in games, but realistically that's hardly a huge priority. Games however will benefit by having physics or other computation done on 1 GPU, say the slower 9400M, with the graphics rendering done on the other GPU, say the 9600M. This will be faster than trying to SLI the 9400M and 9600M, dealing with the overhead, and having graphics rendering and physics compete for time in the combined GPU and having to deal with memory thrashing.
SLI is possible because Nvidia is now producing the chipsets for macs, we could easily see SLI in the new MacPro, wether it has anything to do with OpenCL though is unknown
I followed links from the OP to a slide show in PDF format. One of the sections in the slide show is "technical overview". It's about 15 slides in. There is an example of using a GPU to invert a square matrix. Lots of "set up" involved seting up command queues and creating an "instance" of the computer kernal and so on. So you'd better have quite a few square matrices that need to be inverted or it seems you'd be better off using a conventional library. But if your robot controller needs to solve a set of simultaneous equations 100 times a second OpenCL is the ticket.
I don't have the link but it was only 2 or 3 clicks from the macrumors front page.
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.
I wonder if OpenCL will be used by OS X to accelerate its GUI...
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.
I wonder if OpenCL will be used by OS X to accelerate its GUI...
Has someone actually compared the syntax and implementation between OpenCL and CUDA. It'd be interesting if they really are closely related since I believe the guy that Apple hired to develop the OpenCL spec was actually a former ATI guy. Although, I guess OpenCL, CUDA, CTM, and DX11 would all be fairly closely related since they are running on similar graphics architectures and are doing similar things.
I don't see how nVidia producing a mobile chipset really has much effect on the Mac Pro. nVidia could only produce a mobile chipset now after having had to cajole a mobile FSB license from Intel. nVidia has tried to get a server FSB license to make a platform for Quadro, but Intel has steadfastly denied them. This isn't likely to change since the server market is a huge money maker and stability is also key so Intel wouldn't want to risk diluting anything.
nVidia themself has also refused to license SLI for use on Intel chipsets up to now. They've only recently allowed SLI on Skulltrail and the X58, because they had no way of developing their own chipset for these platforms. The Skulltrail platform was actually server based which they are locked out of and Intel hasn't given nVidia a QPI license so nVidia can't make high-end desktop chipsets.
If nVidia wants to get better performance on Mac, they really ought to optimize their drivers, since the HD3750 still outperforms the 8800GT in Core Image acceleration, and get the most out of their existing technology before trying to SLI things.
GPGPU and OpenCL is only really effective in highly parallel, floating point tasks. Like encoding video. So we'll see it in all the media apps and the new Quicktime X. It won't likely help the GUI directly, although Apple could program some complicated but questionably useful physics effects. Like dropping stuff in the trash could make the can and the dock shake realistically.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.
I wonder if OpenCL will be used by OS X to accelerate its GUI...
Only for very computationally intensive applications that would make use of OpenCL. But then you'd get a corresponding increase in speed.
In general use, it shouldn't make a difference.
Perhaps people are expecting the usual "standards" jockeying when Microsoft is involved in the process.
You'd be amazed at the progress we can make when we remove Microsoft from the equation.
Funny, but funny in a sad way for it has so often in the past been true.
On the other hand, if OpenCL turns out to be a steaming pile of fresh dung - they can blame the schedule.
I hope for Apple's sake that the adage "haste makes waste" doesn't become appropriate.
Wide exposure and deliberation on a standard aren't fast, but they help produce a solid spec that doesn't need a lot of revisions as it is implemented and released.
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.
I'm just wondering if Photoshop, Final Cut Pro or 3D render apps start integrating with it closely, then surely the GPU will start to be pushed in the same way as when playing say a 3D game? We all know that the fans spin up.
Also, I think the new APIs are likely to inspire developers to come up with new more powerful apps which they may not have thought about before?
The more I read about what Snow Leopard is going to be, the more convinced I am that much of this was originally planned to be in Leopard. Maybe even some of this constitutes the "secret features" Steve talked about that failed to materialize. (Complain about that if you must, but I prefer they stay tight-lipped about features if they're not sure they can ship them instead of over-promising and under-delivering.)
I can't help but think that so many of these features sound like things that may have been yanked from Leopard at the last minute to meet their already slipping release date.
I can't help but think that so many of these features sound like things that may have been yanked from Leopard at the last minute to meet their already slipping release date.
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.
Did I say it was? DirectX has more than its fair share of inadequacies, as does OpenGL. But it works perfectly well for what Apple does with it.
Games are a huge focus of D3D, so of course it will best an API that doesn't give games much importance.
Well the idea is that for tasks that can be optimized for GPGPU, the GPU would be able to get them done faster than the CPU. So instead of the CPU working all out for half an hour, the GPU works all out for 5 minutes. If these are going to be tasks you were going to do anyways, then there is a net power savings. Of course, it may encourage more use of the GPU as more programs come up, but that's just progress.
Um, since when does Steve Jobs talk about Macs at Macworld anyway?
(I kid. I kid... sorta.)