Nexus 4, Nexus 10 found to have OpenCL drivers
Well, this is quite the interesting story. Anandtech is reporting that drivers for OpenCL, a standard that allows developers to tap into parallel computing power for multi-core GPUs and CPUs, are said to be injected in the firmwares of the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10.
It’s no secret that the likes of Samsung and Qualcomm have been testing OpenCL for their mobile chipsets, but this would mark the first known instance of OpenCL in such devices. For now, only the Mali T604 setup on the Nexus 10 and the combination of Qualcomm’s quad-core Krait CPU and Adreno 320 GPU on the Nexus 4 are known to have it, and the claims were tested by members of the community using methods to access OpenCL and benchmarks to confirm its operation.
If you’re confused about what this means, the easiest way to explain it would be to say OpenCL allows the GPU of the chipset to help handle some of the tasks that CPUs normally do, meaning a nice bit more of computational power can be squeezed out of these devices.
It’s a technology that has been used in the desktop space for quite some time, but its arrival to mobile will be monumental to advances in the performance of embedded system-on-chip designs. This doesn’t mean much to any of us for now, but it sounds like we’re one step closer to a whole new class of power if the discovery of this technology in these particular devices are anything to go by. Developers who want to see some basic functionality of OpenCL in the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 can take a look at the sample code here.
[via Anandtech, thanks to everyone who sent this in!]