Applications :: Using Grand Central Dispatch And OpenCL?
Jul 4, 2010
When Snow Leopard came out last year, Apple made marketing out of the fact of having no new features. Arstechnica wrote a splendid review praising the potential of the two new core technologies it brought, and the perspective performance improvements coming from them.
The "radically new development paradigm" was promising for a slower deployment, but I though it would have been compensated by the advantages in speed and code maintainability.
So I've been periodically sampling the Internet for news on either technology. I expected lists of applications employing them, or some visibility on existing apps directories (like "GCD" or "OCL" tags). In lack of these I then resorted to expecting some random block posts from developers, but even of this I find very little.
The most material you find from Robert Watson, concerning applications at the FreeBSD project!
So what happened to these technologies under the Mac? Did they pass ignored by Mac Developers? If so, why? If not, why do they not reflect publicly the same excitement that the competent Ars masters showed?
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology, which debuted in Snow Leopard as a mechanism for optimizing parallelism across multiple cores and processors, has now been ported to FreeBSD. Apple publicly announced plans to release its GCD technology as open source last month; the FreeBSD team demonstrated its early port of the new feature at EuroBSDCon 2009 in Cambridge, UK just days after Apple's announcement. Out of the box support for GCD is scheduled to appear with the release of FreeBSD 8.1. The work required to port Apple's GCD event and concurrency framework to other operating systems is more complex than many other higher-level open source packages because GCD requires integration into the kernel (the core component of the operating system which manages processes, memory, and other hardware).
Most Unix-based software is highly portable between Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD, but significant kernel differences between these systems makes porting low-level, kernel-integrated technologies like GCD more work. In particular, Mac OS X uses a unique kernel design based on a hybrid of Mach and BSD. Porting GCD to FreeBSD required adaptations to account for a more conventional kernel environment without a Mach layer, such as using POSIX semaphores instead of Mach semaphores. FreeBSD's porting efforts should help to make GCD easier to port to other operating systems with conventional Unix or Unix-like kernels, including OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux, and Solaris..........................
Now that Snow Leopard has been out for some time will Grand Central Dispatch ever be used by apps such as Final Cut or Handbrake type apps? Seems like it is a feature that sounded good on paper but developers never really jumped on it.
I'm really in need of a new Mac, my iBook G4 still does what I need, but not so great in music production In any event, I don't have loads of money and as much as I'd like to buy a MBP, I'm lookin at the Mac Mini, more so now after seeing it can be upgraded beyond what apple is willing to offer. It voids the warranty but I don't care, I've been building computers since I was a kid with my dad (obviously started with PC). Problem is I can't find a central location about matching up CPU's or limitation and all that good stuff. Do you guys know where to point me so I can start checking prices on things to find out if it's worth the trouble?
I have a friend who is always sending me smileycentral emoticons and I'm wondering if there is anything like this for Mac or something similar? If not where can I find several Mac emoticons?
I have a 13" 2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo current gen. Macbook Pro. I was wondering if I can run Grand theft auto on my macbook pro (i do not care about quality/rendering, I just what to know if it will run). By the way, I have bootcamp running windows 7.
Today I received my brand new LaCie grand 1TB external hard drive. So I formatted it on my vista laptop and put stuff like my documents music and videos on it as I am getting a macbook pro next week. I've gone to my mates who has an iMac this eve with my hard drive and realized as I formatted it on vista its in read only mode and i cannot edit it. I have put all the files i need on my mates leopard imac so I am happy to erase the hard drive and format it to mac.
I downloaded GTA San Andreas from the App Store. The game works fine. Only thing is I cannot seem to get the resolution to go higher than 800 x 600 x 32. Is there a reason for this? I am using a fairly new Macbook Pro with OS X Lion 10.7.3. with a 2.66Ghz Intel Core i7 processor. 8 GB ram. I am also using the higher resolution screen 1680 x 1050. However, when I go to the advanced game settings I cannot seem to make any changes to the resolution?
Just about to move to a new place I'm trying to think of the best way to network it with what existing equipment I have. So I will be getting virgin cable installed as my ISP which comes with wireless router although not sure which one. What I basically want to have is a home network with a central storage point for all my music and movies/tv. I currently have the time capsule for backing up my macbook, I lead to believe that this cannot be used to store my music collection which I wanted streamed to other laptop on the same network.
I also have a WD My Book NAS(networked attached storage) drive as well as various other external usb hard drives. I have also just looked at the apple air port express base station which I may purchase. So with all this hardware in mind how would I go about setting up my network effectively so that I can keep everything(music/tv/movies) centrally and be able to access through laptops which I plan to have around the house.
I get the following message when I try and open Sybase Central among other things. "You do not have permission to open the application Sybase Central." I'm running Sybase ASE 12.5.4 on a mac book pro. Mac OS 10.6 How can I give myself permission?
I have been reading that Apple worked with nvidia on OpenCL and that leaves me wondering: will ATI see all the same GPU acceleration of nVidia?
I am looking to buy an iMac in the next few months, and am stuck deciding between the lesser nVidia 130 that can use open CL or the fast ATi that may not...
I checked apple's website and went down to the requirements page. turns out, you require a nvidia or a very very recent ati chip to run openCL. the imac that i own has a ati radeon 2600 pro. what i don't get it, how is a nvidia 9400m more powerful than 2600 from ATI there seems to be no other reason than the fact that apple is being lazy about supporting fairly recent hardware. I only got this imac a couple of years a go and its still pretty new. Does apple expect me to get a new mac?
The broad industry support Apple is building around OpenCL will help increase the critical mass behind OpenGL, the 2D and 3D graphics language Apple uses extensively in Mac OS X. Since the mid 90s, Microsoft has worked to prevent the adoption of OpenGL as an interoperable industry standard in favor of its own proprietary DirectX portfolio of graphics software and gaming tools.
Don't get me wrong, the (apple-shipped) 8800GT has never given me a moment's worth of problem but it would seem that if there is OpenCL support for the GTX285 in SL next month, it may be worth it to drop the coin and get this card (I'll take it as a business expense).
Has anyone heard or seen something about officially supporting this card? When I looked on Apple's website under SL tech specs, this card isn't listed.
I have a question about how OpenCL works. What programs can utilize the GPU for processing? Does it happen automatically, or does the programming within the application have to state that the GPU can be used? It seems like everyone is excited about OpenCL and GPU acceleration, but how often is it used?
1) from wwdc latest information, Mac pro user will have only 3 Apple official option OpenCL that is : GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce GT 120 and Radeon 4870
2) but I think GTX285 and FX4800 will support too. (At least final ver. of Snow leopard)
3) Assume you want many core the best selection from 1) & 2) is ATI Radeon 4870 because it has 800 stream processor. GTX 285 have 240
4) Assume you want memory speed the best selection from 1) & 2) is ATI Radeon 4870 again because it GDDR5 (but i can't confidentally confirm it when 4870 have lower memory speed and lower memory bandwidth)
all the OpenCL sample apps from Apple, except for the "hello world" example, are failing.
Can anyone else confirm the same errors on their setup? Just so that I know for sure it is due to the 4870.
I will try putting in my GT120 and see what happens.
Code: Last login: Sat Aug 29 16:35:11 on ttys002 /Users/mani/Downloads/OpenCL_RayTraced_Quaternion_Julia-Set_Example/build/Debug/qjulia ; exit; Galactus:~ mani$ /Users/mani/Downloads/OpenCL_RayTraced_Quaternion_Julia-Set_Example/build/Debug/qjulia ; exit; Creating Texture 512 x 512... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Using active OpenGL context... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Connecting to AMD Radeon HD 4870... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Loading kernel source from file 'qjulia_kernel.cl'... Error opening file qjulia_kernel.cl Error: Failed to load kernel source! Failed to setup compute kernel! Error 1 logout
[Process completed]
Code: /Users/mani/Downloads/transpose/transpose ; exit; Galactus:~ mani$ /Users/mani/Downloads/transpose/transpose ; exit; Error: Failed to load compute program from file! logout
[Process completed] And here's output from hello.c, which happens to work:
In the tech specs for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard it only lists the ATI Radeon 4850 and 4870 for supported graphics cards for OpenCL so does this new 4670 support OpenCL? I think it would be pretty silly to have the cheaper iMac with the GeForce 9400M support it but not the next step up with a dedicated card.
Ordered an i5 iMac 27" this morning with no customisations, for delivery to UK.I assumed it would be dispatched from China and arrive next week although the apple store is showing an estimated delivery of 21st (tomorrow) through to friday 23rd.Would I be right in assuming this is being dispatched from a UK warehouse then, and I'm just wondering how likely I would be to actually receive it tomorrow.
I am trying to figure out for certain, does the newest 13" MacBook Pro model with Nvidia 320M graphics support OpenCL out of the box? I would guess that it does, but I haven't found a clear answer for it anywhere. The 9400M on the previous model is mentioned as OpenCL-supported.
I recently went through my Applications folder and uninstalled some applications. Now and then, I'll find a file or a folder or a bunch of files and folders from an uninstalled application. Does anyone know of an application that can delete these files that I no longer need?
Sorry for the incredibly stupid question, but I just got the gfxCardStatus application for my i5, and was wondering whether turning on the NVIDIA video card will make applications like Mail, Firefox, etc. faster?
I read something about OpenCL, but am not really sure whether it works for all applications.
I find that turning on the NVIDIA card, instead of using the integrated Intel one, makes my laptop hotter.
I have a second user on my Mac Snow Leopard. I have the calculator in my Applications and Dock...he doesn't. How can I get this for the second user? (I recently upgraded with the disc to Snow Leopard..could that be part of the problem?)
how to not have the disc image appear on my desktop when I open applications that I downloaded. For example I downloaded wondershare dvd ripper and everytime I open it the disc image shows up on my desktop and I cant eject it without quitting the application. This is now happening with every application I open and it never happened before.
Here's a screen shot of my applications folder, Can anyone explain or help me with this?I find this strange that it appears that I have two versions of Logic installed on my computer, Is there anyway I can "merge" or "trash" one without losing any data?
