Apple Planning Snow Leopard Surprise?

Rumors are that Apple will be showing its new OS at next month’s Macworld, and that it has a few surprises up its sleeve.
The word is that Snow Leopard, as it’s currently known, will ship earlier than expected, well before Microsoft releases Windows 7. But the bigger surprises will not be on obvious view.

The Guardian reports that Snow Leopard is likely to contain a pair of technologies that will speed up software without needing any hardware changes. The first, called Grand Central, will make better use of the Intel processors the current range of Macs are sporting.

But it’s the second, known as OpenCL, which offers the radical change, as it harnesses the power of graphics processors, known as GPUs, that currently goes untapped.

Each GPU contains many processors – 16 on the low-end Macbooks, up to 64 on Mac Pros – that can perform calculations almost 10 times faster than the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. So why haven’t people used this before?

The answer is that until now, programmers needed to know exactly what the hardware was; what would work with one GPU chip wouldn’t work on a rival chip, so software has only been designed for the main processors.

But OpenCL will take a different approach, able to covert an application on the fly to work on whatever GPU the machine contains. And it’s all happened more quickly than expected, in part because Apple took the problem to the Khronos Group, which creates open standards for parallel computing and graphics.

Solving the problem took just six months, rather than the expected 18, motivated by the possibility of inclusion in Snow Leopard. Neil Trevett, president of Khronos, said:

"Apple shipping OpenCL with Snow Leopard will be a tremendous boost, and that prospect motivated companies."

Beating Windows 7 to market would also be a great feather in Apple’s cap, although it’s likely to be around March before Snow Leopard sees a commercial release.

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