PowerCADD is famed for its speed as a 2D CAD system but much of this fame has vanished within the industry as AEC CAD has shifted to 3D and BIM. Regardless, the company has taken steps to keep PowerCADD incredibly fast in version 9. For starters it has shed its “Classic Mac” formats while supporting the very latest Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) operating system. It is optimized for 64-bit on Core 2 Duo and Xenon.

PowerCADD 9 – Key Features

• Older drawings brought forward to PowerCADD 9 get automatically Spotlight indexed so you can search your drawings and archives by word content
• Likewise all drawings brought forward to PowerCADD 9 get QuickLook support
• New alpha back plane editing of bit map images
• PDF import and PDF conversion to editable objects
• Smaller file sizes and a more compact program memory footprint…means more speed!
• Use of Snow Leopard’s Text Engine with PowerCADD 9’s Advance Text tool
• AutoCAD 2010 read/write support for import/export
• Improved AutoCAD Model and Paper space interface
• Place Area function is now live and interactive
• Improved File Reference controls

Engineered Software says the Overview Window redraw speed is now almost instant. The Help Menu now utilizes the latest technology in OS X including search function for OS X Finder’s Online Help. PowerCADD 9’s manual is a searchable PDF.

To learn more visit them online here: http://engsw.com/

OpenCL conformance tests are now available with new conformant products now shipping. Additionally, the OpenCL Working Group membership has expanded to 33 members in the areas of high-performance computing, gaming, middleware, system and silicon vendors. Participating at SC09, an international conference for high-performance computing, Khronos Group members will be highlighting the power and scalability of OpenCL.

OpenCL Products – Trademark Use and Conformance

Before a product can use the OpenCL trademark it must pass a conformance test suite by Khronos for OpenCL 1.0. This suite was released in May 2009 and a number of shipping products have successfully passed including products from AMD, Apple and Nvidia.

In the case of Apple its latest operating system, Snow Leopard, utilizes OpenCL. Apple created OpenCL and opened it up as an industry standard giving control of the standard to the Khronos Group.

“By enabling cross-platform development for heterogeneous architectures, OpenCL is helping to bring GPU compute capability to mainstream applications,” said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing at AMD.

“Nvidia cares deeply about ensuring that OpenCL developers have the tools they need to easily develop and deploy mainstream applications on more than 150 million Nvidia OpenCL 1.0-capable GPUs,” said Sanford Russell, general manager, GPU Computing software at Nvidia.

The latest list of conforming products for OpenCL 1.0 support can be found here at this web page. So far most products are operating systems and GPUs.

OpenCL Expands Significantly But No Microsoft

With 33 key industry members OpenCL is well on its way to becoming an industry standard as significant as OpenGL–a graphics technology standardized across an array of industry segments and device platforms.

In the gaming industry key members include Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nvidia and Apple. In terms of silicon systems makers they all the major vendors such as: AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.

Key mobile phone makers are also behind OpenCL including: Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia (not to mention Apple). And the US government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory is also a key member.

IBM has released its own OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power on AlphaWorks. The company’s Power Architecture processors are used in workstations, servers, mainframe computers and supercomputers. Additionally, IBM is a partner with Sony in Cell processors and is exploring OpenCL on Cell and BE processors as well.

For more information about the Khronos Group’s efforts with OpenCL visit them here.

T-Splines has released T-Splines 2.1 for Rhino, which is now on sale for 599.USD. The company is also offering training in the US and in the UK. The next training event takes place on Nov 10, 2009, in Seattle, WA, followed by a training on Nov 17, 2009 in London. You can learn more about T-Splines training here. 

The company has recently added some impressive images to its T-Splines gallery that readers may want to check out. For more info on T-Splines for Rhino and Maya go here: www.tsplines.com/

Graphisoft ArchiCAD News – Events

Graphisoft has a full fall schedule of events planned for its new ArchiCAD 13 with Delta Server technology. There are “test drive” events planned for October through December, 2009 and “road show” events planned as well. 

Test drive events coming up include Seattle, Los Angeles, and Oakland, while road show events will hit Charlotte, Columbia, San Francisco, Charleston, Savannah, Washington DC, Boston, New Haven, Sacramento and Richmond. A complete schedule of events and dates can be found here.

Graphisoft will also be at Build Boston 2009 November 18-20, 2009 as well as other conventions later this year. 

C/Net Tests Indicate Snow Leopard Faster than Windows 7

C/Net has tested both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 in overall system performance and found that Apple’s latest big cat operating system is about 38.5 percent faster in multitasking with media apps and also more responsive as a whole. 

Battery life is also much longer in Snow Leopard than Windows 7 and can last up to 111 minutes in a stress tests compared to just 77 minutes for Windows 7. Mac OS X Snow Leopard lags only in historically weaker 3D graphics support. This last test result will surely be disappointing to Architosh readers on the Mac. 

C/Net tests indicate that without software drivers optimized for 3D tasks at the level that exist for Windows Snow Leopard is noticeably slower in both gaming 3D and professional 3D applications in tests such as Cinebench R10. We would concur with the 3D gaming results of C/Net but would challenge the results on professional 3D applications. Cinebench alone is not an indication of overall pro 3D app performance on the Mac.

To learn more go here.

A Fully 3D Environment

The Vectoworks 2010 developer is touting that the program is now a fully 3D environment but with the outstanding unique ability to continue to lead in 2D drafting and graphics capabilities. A new Planar Graphics technology enables the projection of all 2D information (lines, text, drawn objects) to be seen in 3D space with or without adjoining 3D information. 

Also important in Vectorworks 2010 is the new DCM (dimension constraint management) integration. The new DCM allows users to control objects that have been dimensions by typing into the dimension text field and changing the length figure. 

Overall there are over 80 new key features in Vectorworks 2010. The company said that it has been continually re-engineering the foundations of the program in unison with the work on new features. This more modern underpinning began in earnest with Vectorworks 2009 with the integration of the Parasolid modeling kernel from Siemens PLM Software. 

As a result of this re-engineering Vectorworks 2010 is getting faster than previous versions as it taps into the strength of modern multi-core processors and graphics chips. Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CTO of Nemetschek North America, also told the press that the Mac version on Snow Leopard has been shown to be faster in internal testing than Windows Vista and Windows 7 version of Vectorworks 2010. 

Vectorworks 2010 will be available later this month. Architosh will be publishing a series of features on Vectorworks 2010 in the coming days.

New Features in Cinema 4D R 11.5

• Superior Rendering Improvements – New bucket rendering and a significant retooling of the render engine itself lead to vastly improved render speeds an quality. R11.5 takes true advantage of the latest state-of-the-art multi-core processors and adds new render instancing.
• Enhanced Picture Viewer – the new Picture Viewer in R11.5 offers a vast set of new creative tools to reviewing and editing images and animations, including features like Render History with the ability to compare renders, plus image filters and adjustments, post filter effects and layer management. The RAM player enables users to play back animations with sound even while the rest of the job is being rendered.
• New MoGraph 2 – the new features for motion graphics include new MoDynamics, an optimized physics simulation package with hundred of objects that can be easily be made to collide or be affected by such forces as gravity or friction; plus PolyFX for providing quick and easy explosion effects; plus MoSpline for cloning existing splines and animating them with forces and effectors.
• Improved Interoperability – numerous improvements with R11.5 offer users better integration with programs like Adobe’s After Effects, including support for additional object types; support for Apple’s Motion now includes export of 3D data; plus support for Autodesk FBX 2010 allows for quick and easy interchange between a variety of 3D applications.
• Snow Leopard and Windows 7 Support – with R11.5 the company continues to build on its legacy of leading-edge support of the very latest operating systems. R11.5 is fully compatible with Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard, including access to up to 64 GB of virtual memory. 

“MAXON is committed to providing powerful enhancements to CINEMA 4D that really improve the productivity of users across various disciplines, including film, broadcast, architecture, product visualization, games, multimedia and more,” states Harald Egel, MAXON co-founder and CEO. “The many improvements in the new Release 11.5 will help all customers gain even better results, save valuable time and resources.”

“CINEMA 4D gives my design team the ability to make miracles happen within ridiculously tight deadlines,” said John LePore, associate creative director for Perception NYC. “The new features and enhancements in Release 11.5, especially those in MoGraph 2, truly augment an already mind-blowing arsenal of creative tools.”

Cinema 4D R11.5 is available now, including the new MoGraph 2 module. To learn more visit them online or visit your nearest MAXON dealer.

To read a recent product review of Cinema 4D go here.

Apple officially started selling Mac OS X Snow Leopard today at its retail stores, online and through various channels. 

McNeel states here that the newest Wenatchee build of Rhino OS X supports Mac OS X 10.6 (aka: Snow Leopard). Rhino for Mac OS X is still in development but the working progress builds (Wenatchee versions) are very high-level, functional and currently being used in production by industrial and product designers, architects and 3D hobbyists. To learn more visit this link.

While we cannot divulge the particular developer in question, the major software company has a unique and particular relationship with Apple, one that goes back years and years. We can tell you this: we are not talking about Adobe. 

This note strongly suggested that the release of this new bit 64-bit based software is currently aiming at a June time-frame, timed to coincide with Apple’s worldwide developers conference (WWDC 2009). Apple’s conference is slated for June 8-12, 2009. 

Snow Leopard, New UI and Beating Windows 7

Interestingly, this news come at a time when AppleInsider just reported that Apple is close to unveiling its guarded Snow Leopard user interface overhaul. Jobs originally told WWDC attendees and the press that Apple was just focusing on non-UI based improvements for Snow Leopard, but the company has been secretly working on a brand new UI since the beginning.

Apple is apparently very close to preparing this new UI for broader consumption now, and a two-month window is probably an unnecessary amount of time to prep for WWDC for just the UI–especially given that the company has reportedly been working on the new user interface improvements from the very beginning of this release cycle.

With a major developer hoping and thinking they can release their Snow Leopard-based product in the June time-frame, and Apple apparently ready to go with a new UI, it seems reasonable that perhaps Apple will have Snow Leopard on store shelves within days of WWDC. If so the company will have all summer to drum up excitement and press coverage on Snow Leopard before Microsoft releases Windows 7 in perhaps as early as this Fall.

According to a report by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, 74 percent of companies plan to expand Mac use within their companies. 314 companies took the survey and only 2 percent said they would be decreasing the use of Macs within their companies. The survey cited both productivity gains and employee preference as the main reasons enterprises are adopting more Macs within their organizations. Lower cost of ownership is also playing an important role. Of the IT managers in the survey nearly 60 percent are managing more than 100 Macs within a wide range of enterprise-class companies. To read the full report go here.

No. 2 – Apple to preview iPhone OS X 3.0 at Town Hall Event

Apple invited press to a special Town Hall style event to take an early look at the iPhone 3.0 firmware update. Apple intends to show the IT press that the company plans to stay on the bleeding edge of mobile operating system software and not fall behind its key rivals such as the new Palm-pre with its advanced Web-OS. 

No. 3 – Apple Set to Introduce Netbook-like Device this Summar/Fall

Taiwanese touch panel maker claims working order for Apple. Wintek, according to this post on Forbes, is set to supply touch panels for an yet-to-be-named Apple device. This maybe the long-awaited and anticipated Mac touch Architosh has written about in the past (see images). 

Apple is not the same position as its OEM computer-maker competition. The company’s regular-sized laptops continue to be hot sellers, meaning the company is not under pressure to deliver and compete in the low-cost Netbook market. This means Apple will likely wait to deliver something that changes the overall game for a device that is touch-based and fits between its popular iPhone and iPod touch devices and its wildly popular Mac mobile lineup. This future device may also be powered by a chip from Apple’s PA Semi division. 

No. 4 – Apple’s App Store Now at 25,000 Applications and Growing

Apple’s App Store is now at 25,000 applications and still growing. A report on AppleInsider says the store is nearing a pace of $1 billion in annual revenue. Apple has accomplished with the App Store in just nine months what Microsoft has taken nine years to accomplish. 

“The iPhone App Store has redefined the smartphone industry,” said Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf. “In a game of ‘follow the leader’, most operating system platforms, including Android, Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian, announced they were opening similar online stores.”

No. 5 – Snow Leopard to launch June 8

Infoworld.com has a report claiming that Apple’s next operating system, Snow Leopard, will be rolled out June 8 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which takes place June 6-12, 2009. 

Is Snow Leopard Apple’s Secret Business Weapon? (see Infoworld report).

Apple has not published the schedule for WWDC 2009 yet. However, reports are coming out of information listed at the Moscone Center.

“While the OpenCL spec is announced today, there are conformance tests that need to be developed and then final implementations will be released around Q2 next year.” These comments were made to AppleInsider from Manju Hedge, General Manager of CUDA at Nvidia. 

Snow Leopard’s Grand Central technologies allow developers to tune code to take advantage of parallelism across multi-core processors and GPUs. Both Grand Central and OpenCL are listed on Apple’s Snow Leopard webpage as key big features in the planned release. If Nvidia says final implementations of OpenCL are planned for Q2 of 2009 than Snow Leopard will not arrive early as some reports have indicated. Instead it may arrive around the time of Apple’s 2009 WWDC.

Why the fast push in record time? One Intel employee involved said it was to get it into Apple’s Snow Leopard — of which he sounded pretty excited about. 

Endangering Vista

But Snow Leopard is causing a stir for other reasons as well. For one, Apple’s pace of improvement to OS X is nothing but mind-blowing compared to Microsoft’s snail pace development to its Windows OS and its now beleaguered Vista. Forbes has a interesting article online that is more valuable for its reader’s feedback — perhaps — than for the actual article. 

The Forbes piece notes that Apple is expected to ship as many as 2.7 million Macs this holiday quarter during a global economic crisis. That’s a 13% year-over-year improvement. Expect the rest of the PC industry to be (YoY) flat or even worse.

A reader commented that he manages over 700 PCs in an architectural and engineering firm and sees no reason to upgrade to Vista. “64bit XP does everything we need.” However, this same reader makes very blind accusations about Apple’s Mac tech support costs so we can perhaps judge him as “extreme” in his views.

Ignore Vista and Wait for Windows 7

Another reader says that “if you are a CIO or IT professional, you should seriously be looking for alternatives. Stop doing business as usual, think about what your company or client really needs, stop paying the MS tax for bloated software (Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Visio, etc.) and gain a competitive advantage in your markets.”

Perhaps this is what may happen for many…once Snow Leopard comes out ahead of Windows 7 — which honestly, given an aggressive schedule with Snow Leopard, may just be rushed like Vista was! That will only make matters worse for Microsoft.

Roughly Drafted dissects the three types of “disruption in technology” in this finely thought out piece here. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a very interesting article illustrates the differences between what he calls Conventional Disruption, Dropped Ball Disruption, and Fantasy Disruption. 

What distinguishes his article for me is the notion of the three types. This is compared of course to Clayton Christensen’s landmark book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.”  BusinessWEEK actually has the first chapter to Christensen’s book here. If you have read this book then you will find the Roughly Drafted article interesting to you. It adds another layer of thought to what Christensen so deftly defines. This is all very useful reading for people in technology and in technology investing. I highly recommend it. 

No. 2 – Apeer Comes to the Mac

For those in the business and enterprise space this might excite you. A hot new software product in the collaboration space is by a company called Apeer, Inc. This week they announced that they will unveil a Mac version at conference in Los Angeles. 

Apeer touts it has the world’s first “all-in-one group communication and collaboration” platform with Apeer Professional. A new and unique product Apeer enables synchronous and instant multi-user exchanges using multimedia and documents. All parties can simultaneously view photos, hear music, see videos in real time over the Internet, all in one window. To discuss things with each other Apeer supports built in voice and chat. You can read more about it here.

No. 3 – Apple’s Mac mini and AppleTV may just become one

Yes, this my hunch at least. ArsTechnica has a story telling Apple Mac mini fans to “just be patient.” But patient for what? It appears that an Apple executive tipped off that Apple has something afoot for the mini. Everyone knows of course that Apple’s hobby, AppleTV is still just a hobby but Jobs is being coy about that and has been since the start. Apple clearly has aspirations about the TV, movies and the iTunes Store. In fact, couldn’t it also be possible that PA Semi folks at Apple are working on a specialized chip for the future AppleTV? 

No. 4 – Whose the Real Father of the iPod?

Cringley has really outdone himself this time. In this illuminating read Robert X. Cringley of PBS has concocted a grand chess game strategy behind the departure of Tony Fadell and the hiring of IBM’s Mark Papermaster. 

Moreover, Cringley goes on to say that Jobs really wants Papermaster to head up the PA Semi folks for a secret line of scalable processors (main board cpu’s) that are “optimized for Snow Leopard and beyond.” But in order to throw off the judge he needed to put Papermaster in Tony’s position because heading up the iPod and iPhone division means putting Mark Papermaster into a consumer product line and that means nothing about what he is doing centers on the IT enterprise or the business of computers. Pretty neat, huh? 

And remember what I wrote last week about this. What does the Noncompete Agreement really say? There are three levels to the noncompete clauses. One centers on being a “significant competitor” to IBM. They aren’t even in the same business arenas. Two, a “major competitor” of the company. Same as one. No. And three, “engages in competition with business units or divisions of IBM.” 

This last one is the the catch. Apple’s PA Semi division does, will and can engage in direct competition with Big Blue’s semiconductor business. 

No. 5 – Of Luke Skywalker’s Speeder and the Future of Microchips

Okay, so we all know that in Star Wars there is a whole range of technology wonders that may or may not ever come to pass in our life here on Earth. Or anybody’s life here on Earth. The possibility of a real lightsaber is one of them — unfortunately. Boo…I always wanted one. 

Now researches at UC Berkley are blazing ahead with a new technique in focusing light rays in a process called “plasmonic lithography” and it promises to get those little patterns etched onto silicon-based chips reduced to even tinier scales, thus shrinking chips while etching more circuitry onto them. 

Plasmonic lithography converts light into waves called plasmons, a type of radiation that unfortunately doesn’t radiate very far. So, in order to get such tiny waves of light etched into silicon one must use a non-physical, non-mechanical cushion, thus the “air bearings” technique. Air bearings enable the suspension of the key lens to get within 20 nanometers above the surface of the chip during the etching process. So…remember thinking, “how does Luke’s speeder actually float about the surface of Tatooine?” 

Ah…perhaps it was air bearings?

Bunkspeed (booth 311) will be showcasing its revolutionary CGI applications at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles from August 12-14, 2008. Throughout the show Bunkspeed will be demonstrating its “CGI Made Simple” with HyperShot and will also have HyperShot on 70 workstations at the SIGGRAPH Studio, an on-site computer lab. Architosh will be covering more Bunkspeed at SIGGRAPH news during our show coverage.

Autodesk’s New App

Autodesk has released a new 3D digital sculpting and texture painting tool calledMudbox. The Windows-only tool allows powerful 3D painting and texturing to high-poly models, using organic brush-based 3D technology. Learn more here.

e-on Software and SIGGRAPH

The e-on Software folks will be at SIGGRAPH in a week showing the new Vue 7 Professional Solutions. The Oregon-based developer will be in booth #1129. Vue is the leading solution for natural 3D environmental creations and works seamlessly with leading 3D software packages. To learn more go here.

OpenCL Apple Article at Washington Post

Peter Cohen of Macworld fame has written a good summary piece on OpenCL and Apple coming up in Snow Leopard, the next iteration of Apple’s industry-leading operating system.

Now software developers have realized that the GPUs behind their computer’s ability to display graphics are far more capable of just that. Using these sophisticated GPU programming languages certain types of software programs — like solving weather analysis — now run on the GPU rather than on far more expensive supercomputers using hundreds or even thousands of more conventional CPUs (main processors).

Apple and OpenCL

However having a bunch of proprietary languages for Nvidia’s cards versus ATi’s cards makes it hard for the software developers looking to take advantage of GPUs and hence the industry was looking for an open industry standard. This is where Apple comes in.

Apple developed and proposed a standard called OpenCL and donated its specification to the Khronos Group, an industry association leading many of the standards for 3D graphics on personal computers. The big news is that nearly all the big hitters in the graphics hardware world have decided to back this standard.

AMD, Intel, ARM, IBM and Nokia — along with Apple — are some of its chief backers and will allow this open industry standard to bloom.

Chris Edwards reminds the reader in his article that graphics processing units (GPUs) essentially utilize many many simple processor cores, cores designed to do one thing very well, and when arrayed are capable of vast “computational parallelism.” It is in this sense that they are the piranhas of processing units.

Supercomputing on future iPhones

Despite all the industry support around Apple’s OpenCL standard Microsoft is missing from this picture. Redmond is going it alone with a team at Microsoft Research working on an experimental system called Accelerator. The tech giant has made no formal announcement about whether it will support or compete against OpenCL.

The hardware heavy-weights apparently don’t really care either. That’s because the vision for OpenCL goes far beyond the desktop but to mobile computing devices, things like smartphones for instance. Using a GPU can be 10 times more power-efficient to compute a task than using the main CPU. And power savings is hugely important to battery-driven devices, devices like the iPhone for instance.

Grand Central Puts It All Together

Apple’s plans for its next Mac operating system, called Snow Leopard, include a new set of technologies called “Grand Central” which some have begun to theorize will also manage the parallelization of computation across not just multi-core main processors but also the GPUs inside Macs.

Snow Leopard and Apple’s new developer tools will provide the API infrastructure to allow data-intensive computation-based applications to essentially stream operations in parallel, taking full advantage of the SIMD architecture found on GPUs, ie, the hundreds of parallel compute cores they are comprised of.

We see OpenCL having applicability with BIM (building information modeling) and the types of data analysis applied to the BIM model, such as energy analysis. Naturally OpenCL will likely play a role in visualization and other 3D intensive tasks.

Related Articles

Computing and mobiles: The piranhas of processing await (Guardian)

Apple joins working group to hammer out OpenCL spec(ArsTechnica)