Apple ships CUDA 2 devs kit

IDG News Service — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:20:21 -0700

Apple has introduced the beta version of its development kit for use with Nvidia's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology.

The kit allows users to pump mathematical formulae through the graphics processor installed in a computer. It's an approach designed to harness these technologically advanced graphics processors for use in non-graphics tasks.

Apple's supplied software lets developers run CUDA code to run well on a variety of high-end Macs with Nvidai GPU's installed, including the MacBook Pro.

Apple's NVIDIA CUDA 2.0 kit is available for free download now. On the release, the company writes: "The world's only C language environment that enables programmers and developers to write software to solve complex computational problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into the many-core parallel processing power of GPUs. With millions of CUDA-capable GPUs already deployed, thousands of software programmers are already using the free CUDA software tools to accelerate applications--from video and audio encoding to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research."