Will OpenCL endow Snow Leopard Macs with supercomputer-like speed?
Computerworld – A recently approved technology standard should help software developers to tap the latent processing power of graphics chips and transform regular computers into veritable supercomputers — at least for certain applications. Poised to take advantage of the technology first is Apple Inc. Based on the popular C programming language, Version 1.0 of OpenCL was ratified and published by standards body The Khronos Group last week. The OpenCL programming language, developed by Apple, lets applications offload much of the processing from the CPUs to a computer’s graphics chip, or GPU. Modern GPUs from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices subsidiary ATI Technologies and Intel are as powerful as regular CPUs — in some cases more so. For instance, ATI’s latest Radeon HD 4870 GPU has almost 1 billion transistors, more than twice as many transistors as parent AMD’s most powerful quad-core Phenom CPU. Even when they are helping to display hyper-realistic first-person shooter video games o
