14 DAY TRIAL // An interview scored with Khronos Group has revealed that the makers of open standard, royalty-free APIs and their associated companies have achieved an incredible feat – nearly finished OpenCL for Snow Leopard in 6 months. Announced in June, the collaboration brought together industry leaders like AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, ARM, 3DLabs and Qualcomm.
OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a standard proposed by Apple for parallel programming. It is aimed at lifting the limitations of platform-dependent or closed architecture, to become eventually the basis for a variety of devices and applications.
“If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” said Neil Trevett, CEO of Khronos, Macworld reveals. “That’s quite commonplace. You actually have to really push to get it down to eighteen months. Our record was 12 months, up to now; we’ve done this one in six.” According to the interview, the turnaround was possible thanks to Apple's imposed time schedule.
“The fact that if we could hit this impossible deadline [Apple] would support it in Snow Leopard was a huge plus to us,” said Intel’s Tim Mattson. “So we have, you know, divorced our families, we’ve had two phone meetings a week, face-to-face meetings and I can’t count how many hours I’ve spent. I’m just almost dead, I’m so exhausted. And I was convinced; I was one of the people at the face-to-face meeting—one of the first ones—saying, 'It’s impossible. We can’t do this. It will not work.' Well, I was wrong. It got done. So, I’m really proud of what we pulled off.”
There is still work to be done, including investigating any intellectual property issues, according to another report.
OpenCL supports multi-core CPUs and GPUs, attempting to lead the parallel computing market. Snow Leopard extends support for modern hardware with OpenCL, enabling any application to "tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications," Apple revealed in June, while proposing the standard. OpenCL is based on C (programming language). With its help, Snow Leopard will raise the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.