Apple's OpenCL adopted by industry consortium

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 10 December 2008 02:17

Development

Industry consortium Khronos Group has ratified the OpenCL specification designed to make it easier to exploit modern graphics chips for computational tasks. OpenCL was originally proposed by Apple and slated to appear in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

For certain classes of operations, a modern GPU can crunch numbers significantly more quickly than the general-purpose processor at the heart of a personal computer.

Life would be a lot easier for applications developers if there was a standardised way of using those capabilities.

And that's what OpenCL delivers: an API that enables the use of all computational resources in a system, including GPUs, CPUs, DSPs, Cells and other processors, with portability across hardware.

It's based on the C language (more precisely, it's an extended subset of ISO C99), so many developers will be comfortable with it.

Furthermore, OpenCL is designed to work alongside OpenGL (which is another Khronos standard), efficiently sharing hardware resources and data. For example, OpenCL might be used to generate image data before it is rendered by OpenGL.

It normally takes years for industry bodies to establish standards, but Khronos Group created the public specification for OpenCL in less than six months.

Participants in Khronos Group's OpenCL effort include 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, and Texas Instruments.

The involvement of Intel, AMD (which owns ATI) and NVIDIA means OpenCL is likely to gain wide support in the industry.

What do key participants have to say, and what's ahead for OpenCL? Please read on.