From the looks of comments made by an Nvidia rep in a discussion with AppleInsider today about CUDA versus OpenCL, it appears that Apple with its OpenCL-based Snow Leopard operating system will not be ready to release that OS until the second quarter (Q2) of 2009. From the AppleInsider report:
“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.