Apple has its new "Grand Central/OpenCL" feature planned out for Snow Leopard. OpenCL is a feature that uses the immense parallel computing power in a video card for other purposes. Has it occurred to anyone that Apple may be looking at other applications for OpenCL besides the desktop? The fact that this comes from the same company that had the novel idea to put a video card in a phone makes me believe that:
- The iPhone 3G may come with a faster video card, both to help Core Animation renders as well as take some of the load off of the processor.
- iPhone Firmware 2.0 may include OpenCL already. In the same way that iPhone Firmware 1.0 was a Leopard-based system, iPhone Firmware 2.0 may be Snow Leopard based, or at least take advantage of the graphics card when Core Animation is not being used.
- OpenCL will set the iPhone apart from Android, as it will make the already fast iPhone experience even faster. Although users do not normally run very intensive tasks on their phone, the phone may be called upon more and more to do things such as blogging and the like. Parallelism is also useful in things such as fast Javascript interpreters (critical for a mobile device.)
Speed and responsiveness are of the essence on a mobile phone, because to do a task in thirty seconds or less, the hardware definitely needs to cooperate. OpenCL contributes to that speed, for although developers are not expected to fill up a graphics card with their threads, they are at least expected to employ parallelism in their applications. Multiple threads have many uses (background polling, perhaps? If Apple did not already have a solution it would be a good argument), and it is possible that Apple may deliver the first mobile phone that really makes use of multiple threads.
Technorati Tags: 3G, Apple, Cell Phones, Core Animation, iPhone, iPhone SDK, Mac OS X, OpenCL, Quartz, Smartphone, Snow Leopard
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