OpenCL ready for Snow Leopard

 

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Posted on 9 Dec 2008 at 12:22

An alliance of technology companies including Apple has completed the specification for one of the core technologies in the forthcoming Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X.

The Khronos Group has announced that OpenCL 1.0 is now available to developers who want to be able to take advantage of the latent computing power in modern multicore and graphics processors.

The technology was introduced earlier this year, when Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said that it would provide Macs running Snow Leopard with capabilities “way beyond” rival technologies.

Khronos Group was impressed and proposed OpenCL as the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming, establishing a working group that included many of the computer industry’s leading lights, among them AMD and its ATI graphics subsidiary, iPhone chip-maker ARM, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Nvidia.

“The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable compute and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of co-operation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group. “As an open, cross-platform standard, OpenCL is a fundamental technology for next generation software development that will play a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem and we look forward to seeing implementations within the next year.”

And the first of those implementations may well be Snow Leopard.

“We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple developed OpenCL so that any application in Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, can harness an amazing amount of computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”

Author: Simon Aughton