OpenCL came in to limelight when Apple announced that they would use the new standard in its upcoming Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Khronos describes OpenCL as the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld embedded devices. The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specifications.
OpenCL enables software developers to take full advantage of a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). OpenCL consists of an API for coordinating parallel computation and a programming language for specifying those computations.
“We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple developed OpenCL so that any application in Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, can harness an amazing amount of computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”
The companies supporting OpenCL include 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umeå University. You can get more information and details about OpenCL 1.0 specification at Khronos’ website.
[Via MacRumors -> Khronos]