Today the Khronos Group has released the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.
Apple’s OpenCL Embraced by Industry
Apple developed OpenCL and sponsored its adoption as an industry-open standard. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.
Proposed only six months ago, OpenCL was at the heart of Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system preview at its worldwide developer’s conference back in June of 2008. The draft specification became rapidly embraced by the tech world’s biggest names in semiconductors including: IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Freescale, Ericsson, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Samsung.
Other key players endorsing their OpenCL include gaming software giants EA (Electronic Arts) and Activision Blizzard. Notably absent the from big list of companies embracing OpenCL is Microsoft. However, with both Intel and AMD, the two largest PC chip makers in the industry, supporting it there is a likelihood that Microsoft will eventually add support to OpenCL.
Microsoft says it has its own proprietary parallel programming technologies in the works. This technology is slated to be apart of DirectX technologies going forward. It should be noted that Microsoft’s Windows-only DirectX technologies are highly adopted in the world of PC gaming but Microsoft has failed to drive OpenGL out of the professional CAD and 3D content creation industries where both UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X are widely deployed and critical for support. Microsoft’s own parallel computing technologies may face a similar fate.
Both OpenGL and OpenCL are managed by the Khronos Group. To learn more visit their site here.
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