http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/ Engadget Comments for Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:33PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
In both cases its not the OS maker that made the 3rd party application in the first place, and this article stated that the application author took advantage of both OpenCL and GCD. I presume that was using the Nvidia card in some way in addition to also improving the CPU core usage through GCD. ]]>Sep 17th 2009 6:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:53PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
even though im a pc guy i work in the industry and know how much of a big deal this will be for rendering HD footage, and personally it cant come soon enough.]]>Sep 17th 2009 8:46PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
Granted, in the WinTel world, its now about throwing more hardware at the problem. Why code it optimized when you can just throw hardware at it? With Apple, you get dated hardware but with drivers that 'just work'. With Windows, you can get the cutting edge hardware with drivers that kinda, sorta work. In the end, it all balances out... sorta.

]]>Sep 18th 2009 1:48AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 3:26AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:33PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:36PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:45PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:48PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
So that if one core is using 25% I have to report it as being 1/16th? I don’t think so! Each core has a usage level of 0% to 100% so it’s easiest —and best— to report the usage of each core based on that. As long as you know how many total cores you have it’s all good.

PS: Representing anything technical with fractions is never good.]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:15PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
System V unices count with 100% as the maximum, so 100% of 1 of 4 cores = 25% CPU load.]]>Sep 17th 2009 8:01PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 8:27PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 10:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 9:59AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
I am going to guess that over 90% was OpenCL, as any decent video encoder is already multiprocessor optimized.

Personally, I don't understand the hoopla around GCD - if you have an app which can legitimately use multiple CPUs, you're at least already using fork or similar.

As a wise computer scientist once told me 'most developers who think they want multithreading actually want multiprocessing'

]]>Sep 18th 2009 3:47PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/500% on my dual quad-core Mac Pro (same generation as the one in the article but 2x the cores and 2.8GHz cpus). I'd love to see more media encoding stuff parallelize more and get a boost from GCD like this.

Like d889 above, I can't wait to see them update the Final Cut studio bits too.]]>Sep 18th 2009 6:55PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 7:00PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:33PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 12:39AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 7:21PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:35PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/BUT, I pwn him at video encoding, GTA, multitasking etc]]>Sep 17th 2009 6:39PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:45PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:46PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
He's using the card hat came with it back in 2007. If he *really* wanted to upgrade he could always get a ATi 4850 for Mac or whatever. But he programs DVD encoding software, he doesn't really do any 3D designing, nor does he game with it.]]>Sep 17th 2009 6:56PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
If he had said something along the lines of using any Intel video card then yeah I would have to agree with you on the welcome to 1990 thing. Since he didn't your post was so outlandishly exaggerated that it rendered your intended negative post about Apple actually come across as a negative post to Apple haters. ]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:41PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:46PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:50PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
Most multi-threaded code is poorly threaded. I don't know if you know this, but it's really, really hard to write well-threaded code. That's why nobody's bothering to "add multithreading" to their super-complex game engines; you'd basically be rewriting the thing.]]>Sep 17th 2009 9:17PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 9:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 6:50PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
GPGPU has been around for longer on Windows too; CUDA and Stream from nVidia and ATI respectively, have been around since 2007. Take a look at the performance gains for video encoding using CUDA:
http://badaboomit.com/?q=node/374
Depending on the source video and resolution, I've seen transcoding times in Badaboom that are just 20% of other CPU only tools or in other words a 500% performance gain :)]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
I'm gonna be honest. I had not one clue about anything you just said.]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
CUDA is and has been available for use on macs as well as windows.]]>Sep 17th 2009 8:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
Perhaps, but GPGPU is useless without standardisation. Apple is also taking advantage of relatively new technologies such as LLVM.

GCD is a better thread scheduler. It's centralised, so it can manage multiple threaded applications at once and allocate resources between applications. You can't do that by using low-level threading techniques, since it'd still affect your application only.]]>Sep 17th 2009 9:22PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
Wrong. Windows is incapable of managing threads, processes and scheduling in this manner. One of the many reasons it continues to scale so poorly on multiple pros and large amounts of ram.]]>Sep 18th 2009 9:40AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:02PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:13PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:13PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 8:11PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/even on a 8800gt 64bit Vista, a video only took 8 minutes where it took 30 minutes using CPU based programs]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:19PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 18th 2009 9:40AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
It's actually kind of bad, in my opinion, that it made such a huge impact on his application.]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:24PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/
You still suck though.]]>Sep 17th 2009 7:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/17/snow-leopards-grand-central-dispatch-and-opencl-boost-video-enc/Sep 17th 2009 7:34PM