OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.

"The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable computer and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of cooperation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification," said Neil Trevett, chairman of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group, and a vice president at Nvidia.

A Gritty Language

OpenCL is a way to program for highly parallel environments. Currently, C is the supported language in Nvidia's parallel-computing architecture. According to Khronos, OpenCL improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories, from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

"OpenCL is the entry point for developers who want low-level APIs. OpenCL is a grittier language that's closer to the actual commands for folks that are really into optimizing their programming," said Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. "Having the endorsement of Apple is pretty important since they are pretty advanced in the visual space. That's a good endorsement from that platform."

OpenCL was developed and ratified by industry-leading companies, including 3DLabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, Nvidia, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, Takumi, Texas Instruments and Umea University.

"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."

Support for OpenCL

OpenCL enables software developers to take full advantage of a mix of multi-core CPUs, graphics processing units, cell-type architectures, and other parallel processors such as digital signal processors.

Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the graphics products group at AMD, believes that broad adoption of industry standards by hardware and software vendors is essential to successfully harnessing the power of stream computing in a wide array of mainstream applications.

"AMD has consistently supported an open, industry-standards approach to stream computing, and is an aggressive proponent of the OpenCL standard," Bergman said. "Now that OpenCL 1.0 is ratified, AMD plans to evolve its ATI Stream Software Development Kit to comply with the new specification to give developers, businesses and consumers maximum choice and flexibility in leveraging the computational capabilities of our graphics processors."