apple

Jan

2009

25th Anniversary of the Macintosh

Macintosh_128k

Happy anniversary, Mac.

25 years ago, Apple introduced the Macintosh and changed the way we thought about computers. For anyone outside a research lab, a computer with a graphical user interface was a revolutionary change in the way we worked with computers.

The Mac was a huge innovation, and its influence is still felt today, but our interactions with computers since its introduction have been largely evolutionary. Seeing multi-touch and speech recognition technologies taking hold in our daily lives today suggests we are on the cusp of revolutionary change.

It’s very exciting to think that we are starting to design our computers to interact with us, instead of forcing us to adapt ourselves to our computers. The implications in communications are huge. Most of our presentations today are static, with viewers passively receiving messaging due to technological limitations. Now, we are developing the tools to convert our viewers into participants, letting them interact with our messaging dynamically—even physically—with sight, sound, and touch.

Here’s to the next 25 years.

Dec

2008

OpenCL 1.0 Spec Ratified

OpenCL Diagram showing integration between CPU and GPU

The Khronos Group announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL spec earlier this week. OpenCL is a new industry-standard framework that will allow the powerful but specialized chips on graphics cards to be used for crunching numbers, just like the general purpose CPU in a computer.

That’s a lot of geek-speak to say that a lot of time-consuming multimedia tasks are about to get a lot faster.

Today’s graphics cards are capable of some serious mathematics, but they’ve always been restrained to using it to push pixels live to the screen. Essentially, a graphics card contains thousands of cores, all of which work on a small piece of the screen image in parallel, or at the same time. A general purpose CPU, on the other hand, typically has fewer cores (today’s most powerful desktops have 4 or 8), so they must process operations serially, or one after another.

With technology like OpenCL, a GPU’s raw processing power can be harnessed for some general computing tasks which can be broken down into independent steps which can run at the same time, like complex simulations or video compression.

The next version of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6, expected for release in 2009, will feature this technology. The upshot for media producers like myself is that sometime in the next year, we will spend less time rendering and compressing our work, freeing up more time to perfect the design itself.