Folding Forum

At this point in time, I'm assuming that the use of a GPU with Mac OS X is dead. It doesn't appear that Apple is interested or willing to fix their problem with openGl. My postings of inquiry in the Apple developer forum have gone unanswered over the last 6 months. I'm not sure what if anything Apple's move to the new "metal" for graphics will impact the potential for the development of OSX's folding GPU capability. I don't know about using CUDA and or NVIDA's implementation of OpenGL. Its too bad having an MacPro with unused GPU for folding. Anybody have any update since Vijay's bog post ~jan 2013

thaks

It's unlikely that the Development team has any inside information about what Apple's plans are, and if they do they probably can't share it.

Stanford systematically avoids predicting the future of their software except an occasional hint from Dr. Pande in the blog, and even then, nothing is definite until there's an announcement that something has been released.

One other important thing to note, the current GPU folding cores use OpenCL, not OpenGL. It is the Apple OS X implementation of OpenCL in the video drivers which is insufficient. Whether that is from the OEM drivers supplied to them from nVidia or AMD which is the problem or another issue has never been indicated to my knowledge.

Also, Apple is known for being very tight lipped about many things in development. So if they are doing anything at Apple to fix this, it would only be announced when they are ready to release.

Weird. I recall as Apple being one of the initial contributors behind the OpenCL specification. Maybe it does not suit their needs anymore.

I've heard Apple has worked out some of their earlier driver bugginess in some more recent version of OS-X. (I can't confirm that rumor.)

That is possible. Whether the fault lies in the OEM video drivers as provided to Apple, in the OS itself, or somewhere in between never was mentioned. Given that nVidia and AMD-ATI have both been improving the OpenCL implementation in their Linux drivers, hopefully that can port to OS X.

Apple doesn't invent anything new. Apple is good at taking technology that already exists and making it look and work really well. Apple didn't invent tablets or MP3 players or smart phones. It made them cool.

If OpenCL isn't needed in a smart watch, don't hold your breath.

As of April, Apple fixed the OpenCL bug

https://github.com/pandegroup/openmm/pull/878

I don't know what the plans are to include osx in future gpu cores

Please do not spam the openmm issue tracker with fah stuff.