Are either the IPad or IPhone capable of OpenCL?

Question

With the push towards multimedia enabled mobile devices this seems like a logical way to boost performance on these platforms, while keeping general purpose software power e

Answer 1

OpenCL is not yet part of iOS.

However, the newer iPhones, iPod touches, and the iPad all have GPUs that support OpenGL ES 2.0. 2.0 lets you create your own programmable shaders to run on the GPU, which would let you do high-performance parallel calculations. While not as elegant as OpenCL, you might be able to solve many of the same problems.

Additionally, iOS 4.0 brought with it the Accelerate framework which gives you access to many common vector-based operations for high-performance computing on the CPU. See Session 202 - The Accelerate framework for iPhone OS in the WWDC 2010 videos for more on this.

Answer 2

Caution! This question is ranked as 2nd result by google. However most answers here (including mine) are out-of-date. People interested in OpenCL on iOS should visit more update-to-date entries like this -- https://stackoverflow.com/a/18847804/443016.

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http://www.macrumors.com/2011/01/14/ios-4-3-beta-hints-at-opencl-capable-sgx543-gpu-in-future-devices/

iPad2's GPU, PowerVR SGX543 is capable of OpenCL.

Let's wait and see which iOS release will bring OpenCL APIs to us.:)

Answer 3

OpenCL ? No yet. A good way of guessing next Public Frameworks in iOSs is by looking at Private Frameworks Directory. If you see there what you are looking for, then there are chances. If not, then wait for the next release and look again in the Private stuff. I guess CoreImage is coming first because OpenCL is too low level ;) Anyway, this is just a guess

Answer 4

You can compile and run OpenCL code on iOS using the private OpenCL framework, but you probably don't get a project into the App Store (Apple doesn't want you to use private frameworks).

Here is how to do it: https://github.com/linusyang/opencl-test-ios

Answer 5

Following from nacho4d:

There is indeed an OpenCL.framework in iOS5s private frameworks directory, so I would suppose iOS6 is the one to watch for OpenCL.

Actually, I've seen it in OpenGL-related crash logs for my iPad 1, although that could just be CPU (implementing parts of the graphics stack perhaps, like on OSX).