Mac OS X 10.6 comes with OpenCL, but how many applications could have better performances if they would be rewritten to use OpenCL? What kind of applications should be rewritten to use OpenCL?
+1
A:
OpenCL isn't a magical "increase performance" button. There are several prerequisites that need to be satisfied in order to gain a performance boost, the first one is proper hardware (a Tesla GPU helps). As for software that could benefit from it, it's any software that does a lot of parallel computing. This excludes most "daily" software, and leaves graphics processing applications (renderers, image manipulation programs), large data-processing applications where operation may be parallel, and scientific applications.
Usually if you write a application that can benefit from OpenCL you know that you'll benefit from it already ;).
Kornel Kisielewicz
2009-12-18 03:12:49
There is no difference in OpenCL support between normal GeForce/Radeon cards and the professional lineups.
Axel Gneiting
2009-12-18 03:17:48
A:
Firstly you can't "rewrite" an entire application using OpenCL. You still need a "normal" language for the GUI etc.
With OpenCL you can accelerate very large data parallel problems. Most problems don't fall into this category.
The most promising candidates are graphics/video and sound processing. But every problem that requires the same operation on a very large set of data will be suitable.
Axel Gneiting
2009-12-18 03:21:28
I guess that most of the normal applications that need more CPU-power would better use Grand Central Dispatcher, which is also used from QuickTime X. From the answers given here, I get that OpenCL is very specific for a restricted group of applications OpenCL is a step forward because it allows to use a programming language C-based that can be used on different platforms.
kiamlaluno
2009-12-18 03:49:53
GCD is basically only a very sophisticated thread pool implementation.You can do better by managing threads by yourself.
Axel Gneiting
2009-12-18 16:57:03
+1
A:
My company is using OpenCL for scientific calculations. While I'm not part of the development team which is using it I can tell you a few things they're using it to do: large scale data processing of images, imagine reconstruction, and massively parallelization of previously written scientific code.
Basically, OpenCL is rather cutting edge. Unless you want to/have to deal with it, it's best left for those that need it. I'm not trying to discourage you but it is a niche product designed for a niche market. You'd be better served studying other areas of programming for potential employment purposes.
wheaties
2009-12-18 03:22:14
As Apple described OpenCL as one of the most important news introduced in Mac OS X 106, I was curious to understand how much applications could take benefit of it.
kiamlaluno
2009-12-18 03:35:41