After our brief vacation, we’re back to work and today we’re talking about the new Apple OS, Snow Leopard and the support to OpenCL. Snow Leopard will be the first to integrate the OpenCL, a cross-platform programming interface based on the Open Source standards that allow the developers to reach the maximum graphic performance from the GPU and put it to work with basically any application.

OpenCL uses the nVIDIA CUDA architecture and allows the system to use the CPU and GPU as co-processors. Thanks to the general integration from the CUDA architecture, nVIDIA was able to offer Apple a vast selection of 10 card models that are fully supported by Snow Leopard. The cards are: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 and Quadro FX 5600.

Besides cooperating with Apple to integrate the support to OpenCL on Snow Leopard, nVIDIA has also released new OpenCL drivers for Linux and Windows.