Leading supplier of integrated circuits adds new standard to GPU Computing Toolkit

Dec 10, 2008 08:03 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA Corporation, developer of graphics-processor technologies for workstations, desktop computers, and mobile devices, has announced its full support for the newly released OpenCL 1.0 specification from the Khronos Group.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a new compute API that allows developers to tap into the parallel computing power of GPUs, giving NVIDIA developers new programming solutions. The OpenCL specification was nearly completed in under six months by NVIDIA and other industry leaders like AMD, Intel, ARM, 3DLabs, and Qualcomm.

"The arrival of OpenCL is fabulous news for the computing industry and NVIDIA is delighted to be playing a highly active role in the establishment of a new standard that promotes computing on the GPU," said Manju Hegde, general manager of CUDA at NVIDIA. "We are delighted that Apple has helped spearhead OpenCL. Their recognition that the GPU will now play an essential role in consumer applications is a significant milestone in the history of computing."

"The OpenCL specification is a result of a clearly recognized opportunity from leaders like NVIDIA to grow the total market for heterogeneous parallel computing through an open, cross-platform standard," said Neil Trevett, vice president of Embedded Content, Nvidia Corporation. "NVIDIA will continue to be very active in the OpenCL working group to drive the evolution of the specification and will support OpenCL on all its platforms, providing developers an additional way to tap into the awesome computational power of our GPUs."

Proposed as a standard by Apple upon introducing Snow Leopard at WWDC this year, OpenCL will provide programmers with tools to take better advantage of existing hardware (GPUs, CPUs) to deliver faster software performance for the end-user. Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is due to come out in the first half of 2009, with rumors pinning its release down for Q1, 2009. The seed notes for the latest Snow Leopard Beta making its way onto developers' computers revealed that the pre-release version of the OS included additions to Grand Central. Apple has asked testers to focus their efforts on Microsoft Exchange support in particular.