What would be an otherwise geek-only piece of news is actually a fairly big deal for Mac users. The first specifications of the OpenCL standard have been approved.

For those that don't know, OpenCL is an open standard for running normal computing code through graphics cards. You see, after years of running demanding 3D modeling and rendering for high-end games, commercial GPUs have become extremely powerful for tasks which call for large amounts of simple simultaneous computational tasks. The idea is to put some of that processing muscle to work on normal, everyday computing code that would otherwise be sent to the CPU.

In practical terms, this system is great for things like physics simulations, medical imaging or statistical modeling. Or on the consumer side, it can speed up things like video rendering.

So how does this involve OS X? Apple has been a major proponent of OpenCL. So much so that the company promised to integrate it into the upcoming OS X Snow Leopard release. By having a working standard, the company is also giving Mac developers every reason to believe that OpenCL is here to stay, perhaps encouraging them to optimise the code for their upcoming products.

How much OpenCL will actually improve day-to-day computing is yet to be seen, but a lot of people are very optimistic about its potential, including the folks at 1 Infinite Loop.

10 Dec 2008