Graphical processing units (GPUs) are of a stunning power, they are as powerful as CPUs or even more, with millions of transistors they are supposed be used for comlex processing, however, most of us exploit the GPU to play fancy video games, with that usage the GPUs are underused, and they can be useful for more important stuff, that’s why The Khronos Group has developed the OpenCL specification, it stands for Open Computing Language, it takes the power of the GPUs and give it to regular application processing, thus, it can turn your computer into a supercomputer.
The first company that took advantage of that technology is Apple, it developed the OpenCL 1.0 and will make it available in MAC OS X Snow Leopard, it will considerably help developers to boost the speed of their applications.
Microsoft hasn’t gone for the support of such technology yet in Vista or Windows Seven, however, windows users can still benefit from the OpenCL technology when the GPUs manufacturers such as Nvidia and ATI support OpenCL.
Microsoft upcoming DirectX release (DirectX11), will provide developers a great control on whether to do the processing on the GPU or the CPU, though, it isn’t as broader as the OpenCL as the DirectX11 will be more focused on 3D games performance improvement.
Tags: apple, directx11, mac os x, nvidia, opencl, snow leopard
