Apple & Microsoft OS updates to use GPUs for more than graphics
New technologies in Apple’s upcoming OSX Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating systems offer a way for the incredible and mainly untapped processing power of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to be utilized by the system for tasks that go way beyond rendering images.
Both new operating systems offer some sort of this technology. Apple has taken the high road and gone with an open standard called OpenCL (Open Computing Language) whereas Microsoft has extended its proprietary display technology DirectX (11). Graphics chips from either Nvidia or ATI (AMD)will work with the technologies but it’s yet to be seen if there’s any advantage of going with one over the other.
This new way to use more of the overall compute power in your system isn’t likely to benefit all types of activities you use your computer for. For example, browsing the web and writing email is less likely to enjoy a bump in performance but rendering video or editing image in apps like PhotoShop will likely be much snappier.
It will be interesting to see which one of these two technologies proves to be most useful. Apple’s approach lets the OS do most of the determination of when to use the GPU whereas MSFT’s DirectX approach will require application developers to write specifically for version 11 of DirectX which might slow down its adoption.
Nvidia: Chips to speed Apple Leopard, Windows 7 | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.
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