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NVIDIA working on Mac support for GPGPUs

AppleInsider is reporting that, according to its sources, NVIDIA is working on General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit (GPGPU) support for the Macintosh.

Unlike conventional graphics chips, GPGPUs can perform general purpose processing tasks and are not limited to graphical calculations only. This allows non-graphical software to utilize the GPU for other processing tasks, speeding up calculations. Software like Compressor could use this to speed up rendering, and Motion and Final Cut Pro could re-use the graphics processor as a standard processor when it is not needed for graphics-accelerated rendering. It would also be beneficial to laptop users, as it would provide more power efficiency (performance per watt).

GPGPUs cannot process every task that a CPU could though. They are used to processing several streams of graphical data simultaneously, so they work best with parallel tasks in which several similar tasks are being completed at the same time (e.g. rendering video frames in Compressor).

NVIDIA's chips use a technology called CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) that allows software to communicate with the graphics processor and issue commands to it. ATI has a similar technology called CTM (Close to Metal).

The important factor that people seem to be missing is that GPGPUs are present in Nvidia's GeForce 8800 chips. This is confirmed by this page. This means that the GeForce 8800 GXT for the Mac Pro is already a GPGPU; it is just a case of developing OS X software to utilize it.

NVIDIA has put out a job posting for a full-time OS X CUDA driver developer, so it looks like this process is about to begin. It will probably be a long time before we see GPGPU-enabled applications because Apple will have to release driver and framework support for it before any developers can start work on CUDA applications. It is a very exciting development though.