OpenCL 1.0 released

**ninja9578** · 12-10-2008 12:46 PM

OpenCL 1.0 was officially ratified by Khronos two days ago

OpenCL is a project created by Apple and worked on by numerous other companies including Sun and nVidia that allows the sharing of processing power between CPUs and GPUs.

For graphics intensive programs OpenCL allows extra CPU cores to take some of the work load off of the GPU cores, which should produce much better graphics.

For computationally intensive programs OpenCL allows the reverse, letting calculations be done on the GPU, which should make programs that do a lot of floating point calculations much faster.

Apple incorporated it into Snow Leopard and I can't wait to see how fast it is. nVidia also added some hardware to allow programs to more easily use the GPUs in this way, should make for some insane OpenGL games.

**Ynot** · 12-10-2008 08:42 PM

I don't get this at all
CPUs & GPUs are very different

CPUs are general purpose processors
they have to be
they get asked to process all kinds of data from all manner of hardware
They cannot specialise
(this is *why* you have other dedicated processors for specific tasks)

GPU's on the other hand, basically do one thing (floating point arithmetic) and nothing else
and because they're only doing one thing
and because of the nature of graphical calculations
they can do most of their work in parallel

I do not see how on earth a software framework can, at run-time, reliably determine how best to deal with set of instructions
send them to the CPU?
send them to the GPU?

the only way to reliably determine this, is if the programmer specifically instructs certain code to be executed on one or the other

I know I'm missing something fundamental here,
but anyway....

**ninja9578** · 12-10-2008 09:02 PM

Here's a pdf explaining the software stack, the execution, and some example source code. It doesn't look very hard to use, and I'd assume that since Apple was the lead in this that XCode will include some software that does lots of this stuff either automatically or through GUI.