Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.
To use OpenCL, programmers write modules of code in a variation of the C programming language called OpenCL C. Snow Leopard translates that code on the fly into instructions the graphics chip can understand and transfers necessary data into the graphics system memory. Many tasks won’t benefit, but OpenCL is good for videogame physics simulation or artificial intelligence algorithms, technical computing chores, and multimedia operations.
