Apple’s competition to TBB and CUDA

Apple recently announced Grand Central and OpenCL which seem to be competitors to TBB and CUDA, respectively. Grand Central tries to make it easier to write multi-threaded apps for today’s multicore CPUs, and OpenCL (Open Computer Library) aims to make the processing power of GPUs available in general-purpose computing applications. OpenCL sounds like CUDA to me, but Steve Jobs says it’s “way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has, and it’s really simple.” We’ll see. Here are some blog posts about Grand Central and OpenCL.

Addendum (June 18, 2008): Looks like Apple has submitted OpenCL to the Khronos Group “that aims to define a programming environment for applications running across both x86 and graphics chips”.  And here is a Wikipedia entry about OpenCL.

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