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STEVE JOBS IS THE LAST CYLON!

OpenCL in Snow leopard is hardly a rumor. It's been on Apple's Snow Leopard Preview page since the OS upgrade was officially announced.

Good point, I wouldn't want my fans going all the time either when my MBP was on battery, draining it in 1/2 the time. Hence, Apple will again tweak the "Energy Saver" prefs to eliminate this from happening no doubt.

If you thought of it then I'm sure their engineers have been thinking about it for years, and scheming like the sneaky little bastards they are.

The rumor isn't OpenCL, it's the purported early arrival of Snow Leopard. And it'd be an early look for devs, not deployment.

wellfleation wrote:

..If you thought of it then I'm sure their engineers have been thinking about it for years, and scheming like the sneaky little bastards they are.

If so, they can't have foreseen the hot-running nature of the chipset as it exists now, tho, and models with more powerful GPUs will certainly benefit more from OpenCL. The Mini won't become a powerhouse that way unless it acquires powerful new grfx prowess in the expected new rev.

Anyway the whole Stream Computing/CUDA/GP-GPU idea only goes back 2-3 years, so that'd be about the limit.

Last edited by Bat (2008-12-20 3:55 am)

Pariah wrote:

OpenCL sounds cool but the feature I am most eager to see is a nice implementation of resolution independence.
If Apple delivered on that it would be enough for me to reconsider leaving the platform. It would be nice if Apple tossed a bone to people with less than perfect vision.

I agree, especially since proper resolution independence was meant to be delivered with 10.5.

Let's make sure they get it right before shoving it out into the world. Spotlight needs to be fixed first and foremost. Bring back Tiger's UI. And here I go off on that same tangent again. But Leopard's Spotlight just pisses me off so much.

~Coxy wrote:

Pariah wrote:

OpenCL sounds cool but the feature I am most eager to see is a nice implementation of resolution independence.
If Apple delivered on that it would be enough for me to reconsider leaving the platform. It would be nice if Apple tossed a bone to people with less than perfect vision.

I agree, especially since proper resolution independence was meant to be delivered with 10.5.

They were actually talking about resolution independence before then, and OS X has had the underpinnings capable to do it for a while (you can install Quartz Debug to enable it).

To bring the topic back to the original thrust,

Macskeeball wrote:

OpenCL in Snow leopard is hardly a rumor. It's been on Apple's Snow Leopard Preview page since the OS upgrade was officially announced.

It's well beyond that at this point.

OpenCL for 2009

OpenCL is a standard managed by the Kronos Group, the same group that manages the OpenGL standard. It's a standard programming model for targeting parallel computing devices like GPUs, and can be used to write all the sorts of applications that benefit from massively parallel execution—all the stuff that people use CUDA and ATI Stream for today. Nvidia, Intel, AMD, and others sit on the OpenCL board and both Nvidia and ATI have pledged to fully support the standard and have drivers ready post-haste.

The 1.0 specification was just ratified, and you'll see OpenCL drivers from the graphics guys in the first half of '09. Apple is one of the big pushers of the standard, and is expected to use it pretty broadly in the next version of OS X (Snow Leopard). Of course, it'll be available on Windows and likely Linux as well.

But OpenCL isn't the only standard way that developers will be able to harness the power of GPUs for more general parallel computing tasks. There's also DirectX 11, scheduled to release in the same general timeframe as Windows 7 (probably in the second half of 2009). DirectX 11 will also be available for Windows Vista, and some DX11 features will run on the DX10 hardware that's available today. One such feature is Compute Shaders, some new functions of the Direct3D API that lets developers more directly access the GPU for general computing tasks.

[img]..

The cool part of Compute Shaders is that it keeps developers "inside" DirectX, so Compute Shaders can be used in games and write data out to arbitrary memory locations that can then be used in pixel, vertex, or geometry shaders. Likewise, the output from those graphics-related shaders can be read into Compute Shaders. This makes the GPU a much more efficient target for game-related physics, particle systems, AI, etc. Continued...

ATi rolled its Stream kernel into its December Catalyst 8.12 driver, hence is already ready for their API-specific apps. Likely a step on the way to OpenCL 1.0 compliance, and needed for operating its free Avivo GPU-based video transcoding app, running on 4xxx-class hardware now.

PC Graphics: The Year Behind, The Year Ahead, p.5

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{Side note to ...

DX10 Pays Off
In our year-end article last year, we claimed DirectX 10 was a disappointment. Games that supported DX10 showed very minor differences in visual quality often at huge costs in performance. Fortunately, 2008 saw that situation turn around a bit. Microsoft's original promise that DX10 uptake would be faster than DX9's, with vastly improved visual quality at the same frame rate or improved frame rates with similar quality, were way too eager.

[img]

In truth, it has taken some time for DX10 to become mainstream in games, but it has finally arrived—it's no longer news that a game has a DX10 mode. What's more, modern hardware combined with better drivers and a better understanding of DX10 by game developers means that you don't usually pay a hefty price for running a game in DX10 mode. In some games, like Far Cry 2, DX10 can actually outperform DX9 while offering some subtle visual quality improvements.

ibid, p. 2.

So no more of that "my games are slower on Vista/DX10" fluff. }