<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">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.<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>More importantly, OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will incorporate OpenCL into the very OS - so everything in OSX will be faster and render smoothly. </div><div><br></div><div>Windows 7, on the other hand, has no plans in place to support OpenCL or any of the older (now obsolete) proprietary GPGPU systems.</div><div><br></div><div>So Windows 7 will be as slow (if not slower) then Vista, while OSX 10.6 will actually be faster then 10.5.</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40500-140.html">http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40500-140.html</a></div><div><br></div></body></html>