[NPMUG] Major coup for Apple: OpenCL becomes a standard

[Charles Firth]

OpenCL is (basically) a codebase that allows programs to access the  
GPU (video card) in a computer to speed up performance and general  
purposes. (called General Purpose GPU computing, or GPGPU) It's the  
"next big thing" in parallel-processing computing.

Perviously, the video card manufacturers each had their own codebase  
for this sort of thing - you'd have to explicitly write code for  
nVidia, ATI, etc - so the only people that did were video game  
manufacturers.

Now, with OpenCL an official standard (it was proposed by Apple 6  
months ago) you can write code for any video card. And a lot of other  
companies have already signed on for formal support.

More importantly, OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will incorporate OpenCL into  
the very OS - so everything in OSX will be faster and render smoothly.

Windows 7, on the other hand, has no plans in place to support OpenCL  
or any of the older (now obsolete) proprietary GPGPU systems.

So Windows 7 will be as slow (if not slower) then Vista, while OSX  
10.6 will actually be faster then 10.5.

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40500-140.html

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