Khronos Releases OpenCL Spec

kpesler writes "Today, the Khronos Group released the OpenCL API specification (which we discussed earlier this year). It provides an open API for executing general-purpose code kernels on GPUs — so-called GPGPU functionality. Initially bolstered by Apple, the API garnered the support of major players including NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, and Intel. Motivated by inclusion in OS X Snow Leopard, the spec was completed in record time — about half a year from the formation of the group to the ratified spec."

Comments

I hope this becomes a cross-platform thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no way I'm writing a single line of CUDA code when it only works with nVidia hardware, and I think there are a lot of other people like me. This could open up GPGPU programming to a much wider group of programmers.

Re:I hope this becomes a cross-platform thing.

[drfireman]

CUDA on ATI would help me a bit. But a quick googling of this concept turned up a bunch of pages saying it'll never happen, doesn't work, etc. Could you post a link?

Great!

[johannesg]

Now, if only they could do the same for OpenGL... Which is needed by a lot more people, and is in my opinion a lot more important for anyone who wishes to be free of Windows.

Re:Great!

[AliasMarlowe]

...to be free of Windows

Sounds like windows is a disease. Come on don't be so critical

Windows is a condition, rather than a disease. It has unpleasant and often expensive consequences (spyware, antivirus subscriptions, etc.) for those afflicted with it and for many others (spam botnets, net worms, etc.). Luckily, it is avoidable and curable in many (but far from all) cases: just use BSD or Linux.

Re:Great!

[robthebloke]

I think the OP meant, "If they could finally get around to ratifying an openGL 3.1 specification in 6 months (instead of being 2 or 3 years late as GL3.0 was); turn it into a useful standard that people actually want to use (which GL3.0 is not); and finally make good on all the things we were promised for 3.0, which they ended up ditching at the last minute. If that happens linux/mac openGL developers around the world will feel less dirty than they do right now"....

He wasn't implying anything about windows + GL as such, more making the observation that openGL is vital to Mac/linux - and as such those OS's are very much at the mercy of the Khronos group's actions (or more accurately - no action at all as was the case with GL3).

Re:what does it DO?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I strongly suspect that Nvidia knows that a lot of CUDA crunching boxes are going to be running linux. It's cheap, it's stable(not mainframe stable; but easily reliable enough for commodity crunching boxes), it has low overhead, and it is easy to administer. Plus, it runs on boring commodity x86 whiteboxes. I imagine that, even if they didn't support graphics acceleration on Linux, they would support CUDA.

Re:what does it DO?

[/ASCII]

The math co-processor wasn't made obsolete. It became so vital to system performance that Intel and friends started including it in on the CPU proper. These days, they call it an FPU.

Re:what does it DO?

[Free the Cowards]

If the past few years is any indication, it works much better on GPUs than on CPUs.

Re:What about other vector processors... like Cell

[larry bagina]

OpenCL code is a subset of c, with an API that the GPU must implement. So it will work on Cell (or any CPU) with gcc and a library implementing the API.

Re:what does it DO?

[mrchaotica]

The two major issues to be solved with that are that you need double-precision hardware (I can't remember if the Nvidia 9000 series supports that or not) and, more importantly, you need to write GPU algorithms for solving sparse matrices.