On Sep 7, 2009, at 8:14 AM, Christopher Wright wrote:
What's always (for small values of "always" -- since wwdc 08, when I
learned of cl's existence ;) interested me would be having the cl
compiler be smart enough to know what classes of kernels can be gpu
accelerated, and target them appropriately (similar to how CoreImage
will run kernels on the GPU when it can, and will fall back to CPU
if it can't) -- even my pathetic GMA950 can surely work on _some_
subset of CL problems (even if it's just the lame "add a bunch of
numbers" kernels), and I'm guessing the 2/3xxx series are even more
capable, even if not completely CL capable; the docs say otherwise,
but I don't know one way or the other. Performance would be all
over the place, of course, and it would take a lot of work to get it
up, running, and debugged.
Purely academic, I know, but it's hard to not consider the
possibilities sometimes, no matter how small :)
OCL is in its infancy. ATI/AMD is deeply committed to to OCL support
but it will take a while for the stars to align. ATI will be launching
their next generation of GPUs this week. These are the first, I
believe, that even considered OCL during the design phase.
The first mac iteration of OCL is limited to 770 hardware because it
uses compute shaders only. There are no compute shaders on anything
less than a 4850 and thus no OCL support. This thread on the AMD Dev
forum discusses the ins and outs of pixel and compute shading and
options for legacy support:
http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear&catid=328&threadid=116102
The upshot is that legacy support is possible for some limited subset
of operations but the question of whether of not its worthwhile in
terms of acceleration would need to be resolved on a case by case basis.
Roger Jones
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