Khronos, the peeps behind Open GL ES, the API that enables really complex and beautiful graphics on mobile devices, is forming a new Compute Working Group that will try and create a standard programming environment that takes advantage of both the CPU and GPU inside desktop and embedded (aka mobile phone) devices. They’re taking Apple’s OpenCL, a part of OS X 10.6, into consideration as the standard for this new type of programming paradigm. Notable companies in this new working group are ARM, TI, Nokia, Freescale and Qualcomm.
It makes fantastic sense when you think about it, people in research labs are only now starting to realize how much computational horsepower they can squeeze out of today’s latest and greatest video cards to do some seriously heavy calculations; video above. The highest end smartphones today are only a handful of years behind the computers we use now, when will smartphone sales eclipse PC sales … who knows, but I’ll put my money on the bet that it will happen eventually.