by Mac pro reviews are now starting to come out and by all accounts it’s shaping up to be a hell of a beast but not in the traditional way. It’s clear that Apple see’s computing power not coming from tick, tock cycles but from harnessing raw GPU power. The tech heads over at AnAndTech have ripped apart a Mac pro, bench marked and analysed it in glorious technical detail’s in the way the do these things.
Does Apple have the clout to actually get by in from developers to embrace GPU power rather than CPU power?
Going back to the PC days I remember being giddy at the prospect of using CUDA (Nvidia) to leverage my then 8800GT graphics card to convert video rather than my paltry cpu. Months and then a year or so went by but the promise of a technology which would use every ounce of gpu power faded.
Intel have tried something vaguel similar allowing hardware encoding / decoding of video during conversion process but again software never really came forward to take advantage. Sure Cyberlink powerdvd and similar apps would use it, providing you had the right cpu in the box.
What could be even more interesting is to think what if this trickles down the Mac line. Surely the Mac would be a viable gaming platform capable of competing with the pc market but more importantly utilizing all the available cpu cycles whenever possible.
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