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Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web (appleinsider.com)
Mikey Campbell, writing for AppleInsider: Apple's WebKit team on Tuesday proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that will focus on developing a new standard API, perhaps based on Metal, for accelerating GPU-based 3D graphics and general computation for the web. Announced through Apple's WebKit blog, the new 'GPU for the Web' Community Group will discuss a potential next-generation web graphics API that can better leverage modern GPUs. Along with 3D content, Apple proposes GPU architecture might also be used to accelerate general web computations. As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard. Unfortunately, the new graphics APIs contain nuanced architectural differences and are not available across all platforms, making them unsuitable for wide implementation on the web.
The whole point of Vulkan is that it is a modern, high-performance, platform-agnostic API. Isn't that what they should use? It's already positioned as all that, it just needs the web folks to adopt it.
that you have so many to choose from.
Now we know that you really are the Internet Explorer 6-era Microsoft of this era. It's not enough to just outright ignore or haphazardly support web standards, waiting for others to do the hard work before you quickly slap together your own implementation at the last minute. It's not enough that you got everyone hooked on shitty prefixed stuff and didn't work to remove it when the standard versions came around, forcing other web outfits to create a compatibility standard around your pwn garbage without even helping them. It's not enough that you've fragmented web video and other standards with your own inferior proprietary versions for years, with your glacial update pace for iOS and Safari forcing people to limit their sites to your whims, but now you want us to believe that you're way is the right way, and what everyone else already supports is inferior? Pathetic.
Apple wants everyone to collaborate a technology that will sit above metal, Direct3D, and Vulcan that talks down to those disparate technologies. They provided a sample to show possibilities that they said they don't expect to be the standard. https://webkit.org/blog/7380/n... Relevant quotes to dispel the paranoid ramblings posted by others. "In order to expose a modern, low-level technology that can accelerate graphics and computation, we need to design an API that can be implemented on top of many systems, including those mentioned above." "We don’t expect this to become the actual API that ends up in the standard, and maybe not even the one that the Community Group decides to start with, but we think there is a lot of value in working code."
Where in the article does it suggest that Apple is making a power play here to position Metal like the headline says? This really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Metal specifically, and is instead about leveraging the entire class of APIs that have been coming out that are closer to the (lowercase) metal. In fact, they specifically said so in the summary:
As noted by Dean Jackson from the WebKit team, advancements in the GPU hardware space has led to identical enhancements in software APIs. He cites platform technologies like Apple's Metal, Microsoft's Direct3D 12 and the Khronos Group's Vulkan as offering lower overhead, and thus better performance, than the OpenGL standard.
The only thing special about Metal that's mentioned in the article is its role in the initial implementation. To pull the relevant quote:
While Metal appears to underpin Apple's initial web graphics proposal, the company does not expect its concept to become the ultimate standard. That said, it appears Apple is angling to take Metal cross-platform.
"We don't expect this to become the actual API that ends up in the standard, and maybe not even the one that the Community Group decides to start with, but we think there is a lot of value in working code," Jackson says.
So, basically, Apple folks have access to Metal and understand how it works, so they're starting with what they know and have so that they can get the ball rolling quickly. Where it goes from there is up to the community, which, given Apple's typical approach their open source/community-driven projects (e.g. WebKit, LLVM, Clang, Swift, etc.), it's likely that they actually mean that. Of course, they'll no doubt use their role in the community to try and steer things to their own advantage, but if they do so too much it's likely that this will simply become another dead-end "standard" that no one adopts.
Just emulate the fastest possible GPU. Problem solved and no need to upgrade like EVER! Also emulate a 1 million ThZ cpu and a billion TB of ram.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
And since we're going with emulation of the fastest possible CPU and GPU, there's no need to use quad-core multi-GHz intel processors and nVidia graphic chips anymore. That means we can run all our computers and smartphones on something like an Atmel ATmega328p!
#DeleteFacebook
You mean the two technologies that don't even exist on some platforms? I'm glad I don't have to deal with your bullshit.
#DeleteFacebook
How was this not the first post? And just so we don't ruin a perfectly good law...NAZIS
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Now if they made decent Macbooks ago, and stopped rubbing as blind in Europe asking for more 600 USD than the equivalente machine in the US...
I'm all for making the web browser more powerful platforms since that can help us be more independent of any concrete OS but I can't understand why Apple does something like this. I mean, they're one of the companies more intently trying to lock everyone in to their platforms. How does this "open" initiative fit with that?
https://xkcd.com/927/