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iphoneipadopencl

Are either the IPad or IPhone capable of OpenCL?


With the push towards multimedia enabled mobile devices this seems like a logical way to boost performance on these platforms, while keeping general purpose software power efficient. I've been interested in the IPad hardware as a developement platform for UI and data display / entry usage. But am curious of how much processing capability the device itself is capable of. OpenCL would make it a JUICY hardware platform to develop on, even though the licensing seems like it kinda stinks.


Solution

  • OpenCL is not yet part of iOS.

    However, the newer iPhones, iPod touches, and the iPad all have GPUs that support OpenGL ES 2.0. 2.0 lets you create your own programmable shaders to run on the GPU, which would let you do high-performance parallel calculations. While not as elegant as OpenCL, you might be able to solve many of the same problems.

    Additionally, iOS 4.0 brought with it the Accelerate framework which gives you access to many common vector-based operations for high-performance computing on the CPU. See Session 202 - The Accelerate framework for iPhone OS in the WWDC 2010 videos for more on this.