OpenCL support

Is it posible apple bought the rights to the technology for sole use in iphone?

There is currently no implementation of OpenCL available for 3rd party developers, such as yourself, on POWERVR hardware and certainly not one for the platform you mention in that thread. Such implementations may be available in the future for POWERVR platforms, but I can't give you news on which ones or when/if/how such will be made available.

I'll use an example: the SGX530 core design that's in an OMAP 3530 board is an example of one of our products. This was licenced to TI and is a design with the capability of supporting the OpenCL Embedded profile. However, it requires the correct software i.e. drivers to expose this functionality, just like drivers are required for OpenGL ES, DirectX etc. Once we have licenced a core like this we work with the customer (in this case TI) to support them in exposing the functionality that they wish to have available in their product. So if a customer wants to expose OpenCL then this work happens, but it requires time and the desire of the customer. This means that developers don't always have full access to every feature that our cores are capable of because the driver support is still being added or the customer doesn't wish to expose that feature.

In summary: we advertise an ability of our core design and our customers get a core design that can do this if they choose to enable it. The developer gets a core with access to the features that our customer has exposed. So developers don't always have access to every feature of our core.

Licence deals involve a certain amount of confidentiality so I can't talk about future products or support from our customers so I can't tell you when or if OpenCL will be enabled on specific platforms on this forum at this time.

Note: none of this is unique to Imagination, other IP companies and hardware producers work in similar ways.

I believe you also contacted us via email and we've answered, but I'll answer here for the benefit of ther readers.

At the moment, the only way to harness the processing ability of the SGX chip in a deveice is to go through the graphics APIs supported. It is possible to achieve GPGPU-type processing this way, but you have to adapt your algorithms to work with the vertex/fragment shader model of graphics work and this ususally doesn't lead to the most efficient solutions. I'm not certain that your project would benefit from such an initiative.

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