Katie MarsalIn an interview with CNet News.com's Tom Krazit earlier this week, Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang dropped hints that Apple was extremely interested in the technology, so much so that it plans to distribute its own flavor of the technology to its developer base.
"Apple knows a lot about CUDA," Huang said, adding that the Mac maker's implementation "won't be called CUDA, but it will be called something else."
Essentially CUDA, short for Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a proprietary set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows developers of various types of applications — not just those specialized for graphics operations — to leverage the parallel processing capabilities of Nividia's latest graphics chips, such as the GeForce 8600M found in the new MacBook Pros.
In the weeks leading up the launch of those MacBook Pros, AppleInsider reported that Nvidia was preparing to deliver its first Mac-based graphics chips that support CUDA. Since then, the Santa Clara-based chip maker has gone on to say that programs developed for the GeForce 8 series will also work without modification on all future Nvidia video cards.
CNet, which actually visited Nvidia's headquarters for the interview with Huang, noted that engineers "demonstrated how a CUDA-enabled version of a program similar to QuickTime running on a desktop or laptop could dramatically speed up the processor of transcoding a movie or television show into a format suitable for the iPhone."
While Huang declined to share any further details regarding Apple's intentions for his firm's technology, the speculation is that Mac developers could hear some specifics as early as Monday's opening keynote address at the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco.
Andrew Orr
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Appleinsider Staff
Malcolm Owen
21 Comments
Do this upgrade is eligible for current Penryn MacBookPro owners?
apple will need to put a nvidia card in the mini or have a mid-tower with a nvidia card to get the most use out of this.
In an interview with CNet News.com's Tom Krazit earlier this week, Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang dropped hints that Apple was extremely interested in the technology, so much so that it plans to distribute its own flavor of the technology to its developer base.
Well, not now they won't. Steve will gut Huang like a fish.
Maybe they can use this to make the Pro Apps run better than it does with the old ATI X1900 XT card. It looks like 10.5.3 improved things a tiny bit, but the ATI is still better for pro apps than the 8800.
Is Apple also going to implement ATI's competing CTM programming support? I can't really see Apple providing acceleration features for only nVidia GPUs since Apple seems to like to dual source most components. ATI's CTM actually seems to have a larger installed base too since it works with the previous generation X1k architecture while nVidia's only starts on their newer 8xxx generation. Supposedly though ATI's CTM provides low-level programming access so you could theoretically implement nVidia's CUDA interface on top of ATI's CTM, so I guess CUDA is the best way to go.
Ironically, with the rumours of Carbon's depreciation and the future being Cocoa and Objective-C, CUDA seems to be standard C based.