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First WebCL Demos Arrive From Nokia and AMD
An anonymous reader writes "Samsung and Nokia have released initial implementations of WebCL for web browsers. Nokia's version works with Firefox 4 and AMD's App SDK on Windows Vista/7 32-bit and Samsung's version on Mac OS X 10.6.7 with Safari and Nvidia OpenCL GPUs. The implementation has little to no use for average users, but there are a couple YouTube videos that showcase the horsepower of GPUs in physics computations — inside a browser window."
Take a look at ticket #1 on the Nokia OpenCL plugin. Arbitrary code execution anyone? The security issues with WebGL are massively overblown, but WebCL seems to be a different matter entirely.
It's an important step for the web. Previously, buggy crap from advertisers could only peg your CPU at 100%. Now it can also peg your GPU at 100%. The war on battery life is nearly won!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
good for real world earnings of about $10 per day - at least as long as the Bitcoin currency remains intact.
Iif you create a web page which does Bitcoin mining in the background while displaying something else, you may be able to get people to do the computation for you.
Bitcoin will probably tank before WebCL gets going. Bitcoin was supposed to be a transactional currency for micropayments. Instead, it's become almost entirely a speculative market. Bigcoin fans are franticallly "mining" and trading, but no major retailer accepts Bitcoins. Bitcoins are now so volatile that pricing anything in Bitcoins is hopeless. (Today's range is $12.40 to $15.00 per Bitcoin.)
Without significant usage as a currency, it's not a currency. It's a pyramid scheme. About $100,000 worth of new Bitcoins are generated each day, and to keep the price up, the scheme needs $100,000 of new sucker money each day. Lately there's been a sucker shortage, and the price has been declining.
My browser is meant to render HTML pages. At least, that's what I'd like my browser to do.
I know that there are people who like lots of bells and whistles, so it's nice to have javascript and all of the other nifty additions to browsers, even though I turn them all off or just use w3m.
Now openCL..sure, there's a niche for it somewhere and someone will want it. I think that this is tremendously unnecessary now, though. At which point does the trend for unnecessary bells and whistles go too far?
Will the browser have the capability to subvert my entire operating system by the time someone says 'Ok, we're done. We bring you the final release.'
This actually reminds me a bit of emacs, but a bit different still as emacs is not exactly visually oriented. This browser feature-war now revolves around the ability to display video, render pretty images and use phenomenal amounts of CPU and now GPU power for something that should sit idle 99.99% of the time, and spend the rest of the time drawing an informative web page.
Careful, you'll have the bitcoin cultists, and federal reserve conspiracy nuts after you. And they have mod points.
Careful, you'll have the bitcoin cultists, and federal reserve conspiracy nuts after you. And they have mod points.
Yes, but they're only fiat mod points.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Why does everyone seem to want to do everything in a web browser these days. I want to use my web browser for browsing websites. If I want to edit photos I would prefer to run a photo editing program in another window rather than piknik or similar in a web browser. If I want to work out pi to a million places, I might run superpi (or watch wierd al on youtube I guess). If I want to play a game, I don't want to do that in a web browser, either.
Folks seem to understand this when it comes to phones; as apps are being made to replace web pages all the time. Why are they doing the opposite on more capable desktop systems?