Published in Graphics

Nvidia has full support for OpenCL 1.0

by on10 December 2008

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Not only CUDA

 

AMD’s only big argument against CUDA and Nvidia’s way to compute was that Nvidia’s hardware doesn’t support OpenCL 1.0, an open specification from the Khronos Group. So as of today, Nvidia officially supports it, and we’ve reported on many occasions that Nvidia does and wants to support any way of parallel computing.

Open CL, Open Computing Language, is a new computer API that allows developers to program their software for massive parallel computing and use the enormous power of a GPU to help speed up the task.

Nvidia started this parallel computing with CUDA, although technically AMD was the first to use its GPU to encode video with AVIVO; all this happened in late 2005. Nvidia is putting a lot of effort into parallel computing, as this is a brand new market that is very profitable, and if Nvidia makes more people use GPU for non-graphics stuff, this will mean that the company's market will immediately expand.

Nvidia’s CUDA has support for other industry standard languages such as C, Java, Fortran and Python. Nvidia also claims that 100 million of its GPUs are CUDA / OpenCL capable and the science community can get a 20 to 200 fold speed increase using CUDA over CPU and also claim that 25,000 developers are developing CUDA today.

Maju Hegde, previous CEO of acquired Ageia who is now general manager of CUDA at Nvidia, is happy with arrival of OpenCL and he is happy that even mighty Apple has embraced OpenCL. He believes that “Their (Apple’s) recognition that the GPU will now play an essential role in consumer applications is a significant milestone in the history of computing."

Nvidia’s Neil Travett, who is a VP of embedded content, holds the position of chair of the OpenCL working group at Khronos. We just hope that Open CL won’t end up as open standard OpenGL, that has a single supporter called Jon Carmack in the gaming world. We just fear that Microsoft will again play a judging role and we are not aware of what Microsoft wants to support today.

Last modified on 11 December 2008
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