Apple's OpenCL adopted by industry consortium

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 10 December 2008 02:17

IT Industry - Development

Intel's vice president and general manager of its visual computing software division Elliot Garbus said "Over the years Intel has worked closely with the industry to innovate through open standards and is a long standing member of the Khronos board of promoters.

"With the introduction of OpenCL, we see new opportunities for developers to innovate through a task- and data-parallel programming environment that can benefit from the performance and flexibility of current and future Intel products."

Speaking for AMD,  Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the graphics products group said "AMD believes that broad adoption of industry standards by hardware and software vendors is essential to successfully harnessing the power of stream computing in a wide array of mainstream applications.

"AMD has consistently supported an open, industry standards approach to stream computing, and is an aggressive proponent of the OpenCL standard."

As for NVIDIA, Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technical marketing, said "OpenCL adds fuel to the most exciting parallel computational revolution of our generation – GPU computing.

"It also provides another powerful way to harness the enormous processing capabilities of our CUDA-based GPUs on multiple platforms."

And we mustn't miss out Apple: "We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL," said 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."

Another factor that should speed the adoption of OpenCL is that there is no charge to developers who wish to use it, although anyone that implements OpenCL itself must pay for conformance testing before they can use the trademark.

Future plans for OpenCL include an embedded profile that would allow compute-intensive applications to run on handheld devices with extreme power efficiency.