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Apple's Snow Leopard bounded closer to reality today - and there's a strong possibility it leapt well past Windows 7 in the process.
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Today, at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore, the Khronos Group, a self-described 'member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices,' released the OpenCL 1.0 specification, which the association describes as 'the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.'
The release of OpenCL 1.0 is a giant step towards the long-sought goal of industry-wide GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPUs), in which the massively parallel capabilities of GPUs (graphics-processing units) are brought to bear on general-purpose applications that would benefit from highly parallel processing. Not only would such current image-based tasks as media processing, video and sound editing, and image processing be able to tap into the resources of GPUs, but GPGPU might also enable as-yet-impossible operations such as real-time ray tracing, infallible voice recognition, and webcam-based lip reading.
The key word, of course, is 'might.' OpenCL does, however, have enough promise that both Nvidia and AMD also released statements today, with Nvidia announcing its 'full support' and AMD saying that it plans to 'rapidly adopt the OpenCL 1.0 programming standard and integrate a compliant compiler and runtime into the free ATI Stream SDK.' Note also that OpenCL is a cross-platform specification, and not tied to one manufacturer's GPU, such as is Nvidia's CUDA.
What's more, the OpenCL standard has been 'created and ratifed' by (take a deep breath) 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, Samsung, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments, and others.
No matter how you slice it, that's a pretty impressive cast of characters.
Among all of those players, the most immediate beneficiary should be Apple, which provided the preliminary OpenCL specification six months ago. The company's planned upgrade/bug-fix to its current Leopard iteration of Mac OS X - cutely dubbed Snow Leopard and announced in June of this year - is scheduled to bring OpenCL to the masses when it is released next year. Some even say it will arrive as early as March. Apple's marketing materials claim that OpenCL 'makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.'
Marketing-speak, to be sure, but Apple's promise of zippy OpenCL computing in the 2009 timeframe sounds mighty good to us.
You'll notice, however, that one prominent name is missing from the 'created and ratified' gang listed above: Microsoft. And as today's TG Daily astutely points out, 'If [OpenCL] provides those dramatic speed improvements Apple promises and if it sparks the development of a wave of new applications, then Microsoft may have a much bigger problem at the end of next year than it has today. A cleaned up interface and touchscreen support [in Windows 7] may not cut it.' ®
Review The 13in MacBook Pro I reviewed last week is a machine for folk who fancy a carry-around computer but who want a bit more welly than the way more portable 13in MacBook Air can provide. The 15in version, on the other hand, is a desktop replacement for the power hungry.
Sure, it's mobile. It has a decent battery life. But it's not a computer to keep with you at all times. Performance is its virtue, not portability.
And what performance. Like the 13in MBP, the new 15-incher is built around Intel's second-generation Core i processors, this time all four-core, eight-thread boys. As you'll see from the benchmark results on the following pages, it makes a difference.
I took a spin with the 2GHz Core i7-2635QM-based version, but Apple also offers a model with a 2.2GHz quad-core chip. The latter is £300 more expensive, but you get an extra 250GB of hard drive storage - 750GB to the lesser model's 500GB - double the dedicated video memory - 1GB of it - and a more upscale AMD GPU, the Radeon HD 6750M.
The cheaper of the two 15in MBPs has the Radeon HD 6490M with 512MB of GDDR 5. Both version also have an integrated Intel graphics core clocked at 650MHz but capable of being overclocked to 1.2GHz here. It's built right into the CPU, and Mac OS X switches between the two graphics cores - Intel to keep the power consumption as low as possible, AMD when your app needs some visual performance - dynamically and entirely invisibly.
Rugged
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I have a previous-generation 15in MBP and use Cody Krieger's excellent free, open source utility gfxCardStatus to control which GPU my machine - which has a mix of Intel and Nvidia graphics - to set which is in play. Cody has just updated his app to support the new MBP's AMD chippery. If you get one of these machines, his app is a must-have download.