Snow Leopard Sharpens Claws on New OpenCL Standard

The Khronos Group has released OpenCL 1.0, a new open, royalty-free specification standard for cross-platform parallel programming for modern processors. To put it more simply, OpenCL is the key that's going to unlock processors and help Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) unleash Snow Leopard, the company's next Mac OS X version.

"In OpenCL, Khronos and its vendor partners are developing an open API (application programming interface) for executing general-purpose code kernels on GPUs (graphics processing units) -- so-called GPGPU functionality. In plain English, they hope to unleash the considerable power contained in the GPUs and multi-GPUs used for graphics processing in devices ranging from gaming consoles to game-focused PCs to smartphones," Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, told MacNewsWorld.

"OpenCL developers envision a time when all the processing resources -- CPUs and GPUs alike -- can be harnessed together to execute parallel programming functions. In such scenarios, a dual-core gaming notebook with multi-GPU video capabilities effectively becomes a potentially powerful, highly flexible computing cluster -- think mobile high performance computing," he explained.

OpenCL comes into play for Apple with Snow Leopard, which is focused more on performance enhancements rather than new features -- and Apple is building it to lay the foundation for the future of OS X innovation and third-party applications. Apple is also working to optimize Snow Leopard for multi-core processors as well as tap into GPUs, which all too often sit relatively idle in many computers.

Apple in June previewed Snow Leopard to developers and introduced its "Grand Central" technology, designed to make it easier to create programs that can take advantage of multi-core Macs.

On the Fast Track

Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, Nvidia, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, Takumi, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

"The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable compute and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of cooperation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification," noted Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at Nvidia.

"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," he added.

Snow Leopard Muscle

"We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL," noted 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," he added.

"OpenCL adds fuel to the most exciting parallel computational revolution of our generation -- GPU computing," added Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technical marketing at Nvidia. "It also provides another powerful way to harness the enormous processing capabilities of our CUDA-based GPUs on multiple platforms."

Nvidia is now producing the graphics chips for Apple's latest MacBooks, which use GeForce 9400M and GeForce 9600M GT hardware.

OK, but When?

It's not unlike Apple to have some sort of advantage hidden up its sleeve, so it's hard to say when OpenCL will have a positive effect on Mac users. Snow Leopard will ship in 2009, and the latest rumors are pointing to the first quarter.

Still, when might OpenCL really start cooking?

"OpenCL is an API, which means that vendors signing onto it could use OpenCL as the basis for their own solutions. Roughly speaking, figure at least 12 to 24 months before programmers start seeing usable OpenCL programming languages and tools," King said.

OpenCL will most likely benefit complex gaming, medical and scientific applications. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available here.