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NVIDIA launches Fermi next-gen GPGPU architecture, CUDA and OpenCL get even faster

by Nilay Patel posted Oct 1st 2009 at 2:09AM

NVIDIA had told us it would be accelerating its CUDA program to try and get an advantage over its competitors as OpenCL brings general-purpose GPU computing to the mainstream, and it looks like that effort's paying off -- the company just announced its new Fermi CUDA architecture, which will also serve as the foundation of its next-gen GeForce and Quadro products. The new features are all pretty technical -- the world's first true cache hierarchy in a GPU, anyone? -- but the big takeaway is that CUDA and OpenCl should run even faster on this new silicon, and that's never a bad thing. Hit up the read links for the nitty-gritty, if that's what gets you going.

Read - NVIDIA Fermi site
Read - Hot Hardware analysis
Read - PC Perspective analysis

Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL boost video encoding app by 50 percent

by Nilay Patel posted Sep 17th 2009 at 6:27PM

It'll take some time before we see the true impact of OpenCL and the newly-open-sourced Grand Central Dispatch on OS X, but we're definitely intrigued by this early report from Christophe Ducommun, developer of MovieGate, who says that shifting his app to use the new tech has increased performance by around 50 percent on the same hardware. Testing on a 2007 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro with a GeForce 8800GT, MovieGate MPEG-2 encode speeds went from 104fps under Leopard to 150fps under Snow Leopard, and decoding CPU usage dropped from 165 percent to 70 percent. Now, yes, that's just one app, and most users don't have four cores to play with, but it's still an eye-opening result, and we're definitely hoping it's the start of a trend.

[Via MacRumors]

Snow Leopard shipping August 28th for $29, order now

by Thomas Ricker posted Aug 24th 2009 at 8:28AM

Well, it's not September, but we're not going to hold an early launch of its performance-focused Snow Leopard OS against Apple. The Apple store has come back online bearing an order page for OS X version 10.6 in Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Pro... oh wait, it's just $29 as an upgrade from 10.5. August 28th, that's when, now go 'n get it.

While you wait for that order to ship, Apple wants you to know that Snow Leopard's Finder is more responsive, Mail loads messages twice as fast, Time Machine will complete initial backups 80 percent faster, and a 64-bit version of Safari 4 is 50 percent faster than its predecessors. There's even QuickTime X with a redesigned player that lets users view, record, trim and share video. Of course, this release also includes Grand Central Dispatch, a new way for devs to take advantage of multi-core processors as well as OpenCL support to accelerate apps with the help of that idling graphics processor. Oh, and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange too. All in all, a worthy update, especially for the price.

P.S. Requires Intel-based Mac.

Havok and AMD show off OpenCL with pretty pretty dresses

by Tim Stevens posted Mar 27th 2009 at 9:46AM

With all the talk about OpenCL and Snow Leopard together and how the spec will allow Apple's upcoming hotness to exploit graphics accelerators, it's easy to lose track of the place where the standard could make its biggest impact: gaming. Yes, OpenGL may have lost favor in that realm in recent years, but OpenCL looks to captivate the hearts and GPUs of gamers everywhere by applying some much-needed standardization to the physics acceleration realm, first shown in public at GDC running on some AMD hardware. Havok is demonstrating its Havok Cloth and Havoc Destruction engines, the former of which is embedded below, and we think you'll agree it's quite impressive. OpenCL allows such acceleration to switch between the GPU and CPU seamlessly and as needed depending on which is more available, hopefully opening the door to physics acceleration that actually affects gameplay and doesn't just exist to make you say, "Whoa."

Continue reading Havok and AMD show off OpenCL with pretty pretty dresses

NVIDIA dishes about OpenCL

by Nilay Patel posted Dec 9th 2008 at 8:03PM

We spent some time on the phone with NVIDIA today in the wake of last night's official release of the OpenCL GPU-processing spec, and we learned some interesting things. NVIDIA thinks OpenCL is going to bring a lot more attention to general-purpose GPU computing, and it's planning on stoking the flames -- not only is it accelerating the CUDA release schedule, it's planning on working with Microsoft on DirectX 11 Compute. Hit the break for some more highlights!

Continue reading NVIDIA dishes about OpenCL

OpenCL 1.0 spec released, GPUs everywhere to get a workout

by Nilay Patel posted Dec 8th 2008 at 10:51PM

How time flies -- it was just a few weeks ago that the OpenCL spec was finalized and sent out for final legal review, and now it's here and ready to go. Over 20 partner companies (including AMD, NVIDIA, and, somewhat surprisingly, Intel) have signed on to the parallel programming standard originally proposed by Apple as part of Snow Leopard, and the final spec should allow apps to tap into multi-core CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and even variants of the Cell chip for everything from raw number crunching to interfacing with OpenGL. Sounds hot -- now we'll just have to see how Microsoft counters with the GPU acceleration expected to be built into Windows 7.

OpenCL spec gets finalized, Snow Leopard says "purrrr"

by Donald Melanson posted Nov 21st 2008 at 1:09PM

It's just taken a relatively short six months, but it looks like the team behind the Open Computing Language (or OpenCL) have already delivered the final spec for the standard, which puts it right on track for inclusion in OS X Snow Leopard. In fact, the team credits Apple with helping them meet the "impossible deadline," with Intel's Tim Mattson saying that Apple's decision to "support it in Snow Leopard was a huge plus to us," even if it forced them to "divorce our families" and left them "almost dead." The standard itself, which allows for greater leveraging of GPUs and other hardware, isn't quite ready to be implemented just yet, however, as it still has to go through the final stage of being vetted by all 20 partner companies for patent issues and whatnot. Once that's done, which will take a "minimum" of 30 days, they'll release the actual spec and begin the usual round demos.

[Via Ars Technica]

Windows 7 to feature GPU acceleration like Apple's Snow Leopard?

by Thomas Ricker posted Oct 27th 2008 at 6:26AM

A first true glimpse of Windows 7, Microsoft's Vista successor, is T minus 1 day and counting. So far we know very little. Oh sure, it supports multi-touch and takes 1,000 engineers to code but the real details will emerge from Tuesday's kickoff to the PDC 2008 developer conference. As detailed by TG Daily, the PDC track notes dedicate 22 of the 155 tracks to Windows 7 with 2 further dedicated to GPU acceleration under the titles, "Unlocking the GPU with Direct3D," and "Writing Your Application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware." Interesting times given Apple's announced OS X Snow Leopard support for OpenCL GPU acceleration in partnership with new best buds, Nvidia, and Intel planning to kill off the GPU entirely. Somebody has to be wrong.

[Thanks, Jeelz]