Though the “techlectic” SC08 crowd at Austin’s Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant Monday night was thirsty for cold beer and hungry for nachos and quesadillas, they were equally famished for information on OpenCL, the Apple-spearheaded parallel computing API produced by the Khronos Group. Not much has been revealed about the C programming language-based specification since Apple announced at this June’s Worldwide Developer Conference that OpenCL would be a linchpin of the next major OS X release, code-named Snow Leopard. OpenCL’s addition the Mac OS would, according to Apple, allow applications to “tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”
If the attendees seemed impatient, it wasn’t for lack of speed on Khronos’ part, explained Nvidia’s Neil Trevett, Khronos’ president.
“If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” Trevett said. “That’s quite commonplace. You actually have to really push to get it down to eighteen months. Our record was 12 months, up to now; we’ve done this one in six.”
