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1. #Apple snow leopard system drivers#
2. #Apple snow leopard system software#
3. #Apple snow leopard system windows 7#
4. #Apple snow leopard system mac#

The GPU makers will supply drivers for Windows and Linux as well as the Apple OS. Microsoft's lack of enthusiasm for OpenCL will not stop the technology turning up on Windows. "Microsoft hasn't really made the shift to GPU computing yet," says Enderle. In contrast, Microsoft's equivalent, DX11 Compute, which appeared as a preview release for developers in November, concentrates on graphics, despite having its senior researchers work on much more wide-ranging techniques. It is computation without the arithmetic." But, with GPUs you can also do a lot of comparisons in parallel. "After the fact, I could explain it: people talk a lot about doing maths in parallel. "I never thought that would be the case," Kirk says. "You can do weather forecasting on it and never touch a pixel on the display," Trevett says.ĭavid Kirk, chief scientist at nVidia, says he had been surprised by what some groups have achieved with GPUs - even searching through text. Research at groups outside Apple suggests OpenCL's usage may extend beyond graphics code. "I don't think you will see production OpenCL before February," he adds. Although the standard itself has been published, Trevett says it will take more than a month to prepare the tests, without which companies cannot claim their hardware is OpenCL-compatible. The question is when it is going to be available," says Enderle. "I think it will be a major factor at Macworld.

#Apple snow leopard system software#

However, although Apple is expected to show off Snow Leopard at Macworld, the software is very unlikely to be in consumers' hands until at least a month later - and more likely two or three months later. Having something with which Apple can pound on Microsoft until 7 shows up could do good things for their volume."

#Apple snow leopard system windows 7#

The estimate for Microsoft's Windows 7 is sometime in June.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, says: "There is a rush to get the new platforms to market. "Apple shipping OpenCL with Snow Leopard will be a tremendous boost, and that prospect motivated companies."Īpple has good reason to push for an earlier than expected launch for Snow Leopard: Microsoft is also working on its next version of its operating system, Windows 7, and Apple could wrongfoot Microsoft by beating it to release. Why the rush? So that it could be ready for the release of Snow Leopard, he says. OpenCL took six months, with the group approving version 1.0 early this month. Neil Trevett, president of Khronos, says the group had taken some standards from rough draft to finished specification in 18 months. To get broader support from industry, Apple took OpenCL to the Khronos Group, an industry consortium creating open standards for parallel computing and graphics. But over the summer things seemed to accelerate.

Apple originally said it would take about a year from June 2008 to prepare Snow Leopard. OpenCL promises to change that by making it possible to write an application just once and convert it on the fly to use whatever GPU is inside the user's machine. "GPUs today don't provide a stable environment," he says. Simon Robinson, chief scientist at film-effects house The Foundry, says that is why the company today only ships software to run on the main processors in a PC. Up to now, programmers wanting to make use of the computing power of a GPU had to know exactly what hardware they were dealing with: software written for an nVidia GPU would not run on an equivalent chip from AMD or Intel.

#Apple snow leopard system mac#

The top-of-the-range Mac Pros contain GPUs that have 64 processors within a few years, they will all have a few hundred. There are so many little processors inside a GPU - even the graphics chips inside the low-end Macbooks have 16 - that even a fairly basic model can crunch through calculations almost 10 times faster than the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs that sit inside the latest Macbooks (The piranhas of processing await, 17 July). The other, OpenCL, could have a more dramatic effect on performance for some programs as it will tap into the power of graphics processors (GPUs) that now goes to waste. The first technology, Grand Central, is designed to make better use of the Intel processors that sit inside the current range of Macs.