Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 11th Jun 2008 23:37 UTC
We're continuing our detailed coverage of all the bits and pieces dripping from the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Fransisco. As you all might recall, Apple bought a chip company called P.A. Semi not too long ago, a maker of low-power PowerPC chips, fuelling rumours Apple might use them in its own products such as the iPhone and iPod. This has now been confirmed by His Steveness himself.
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Member since:2005-11-15
Member since:2005-07-07
For instance, how does it compare to Intel's Thread Building Blocks library (www.threadingbuildingblocks.org), which was open sourced (GPLv2) last year? It is described as "C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel."
Apple has not released any information on OpenCL, which I find rather amusing for something touted as "open"
Intel's threading building blocks would not be suitable for general OS X development. While it is a nice library, it is too reliance on templates and it borrows heavily from the STL. That's a really good thing, if you're targeting C++ developers. Since the majority of development under OS X is in Objective-C*, that's not very useful.
Because of that, OpenCL has to be C based. In fact, I'm going to guess it's just a C library and if they manage to do in C what Intel have done in C++, that's still going to be very useful. Not everyone uses C++ and language bindings (for Python, Perl, etc) are a lot easier to write for C libraries.
*You can use C++ code in Objective-C++ but it's not that common as it's very complex.
Member since:2005-11-18
For instance, how does it compare to Intel's Thread Building Blocks library (www.threadingbuildingblocks.org), which was open sourced (GPLv2) last year? It is described as "C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel."
As far as I understand OpenCL is oriented at GPU-based acceleration. In the area of parallel processing a lot of interesting work is going on in the development community. For instance, OpenMP (supported by the latest gcc versions and Visual Studio) is being adopted steadily. I did not have time to try it extensively yet, but from a quick glance it seems to make parallelization over constructs like loops fairly easy. Other interesting work is carried out in parallelization of the C++ standard library, e.g. in GNU libstdc++.
Wrt. to OpenCL: I read some rumors that Apple wants OpenCL to become a standard, so with a bit of luck they will make the source available.
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2008-06-12
Anyone know what the potential response from the other 90% of the software market is? Does this announcement even warrant a response or is it just some basic tools with a lot of hype?
For instance, how does it compare to Intel's Thread Building Blocks library (www.threadingbuildingblocks.org), which was open sourced (GPLv2) last year? It is described as "C++ template library that simplifies the development of software applications running in parallel."
I haven't found any information on the OS community's stance on this OpenCL language. Anyone know anything here? Would any software on a default install of a Linux distro (or OS X, for that matter) have a use for this?