Heralding the era of GPU-enhanced computing, the Khronos Group on Monday evening announced the ratification and public release of the Apple-proposed OpenCL 1.0 specification, the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming in PCs. The OpenCL spec, proposed by Apple under six months ago, is designed to improve performance of software applications (ranging from gaming to scientific and medical software) and is supported by vendors such as Activision, Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Electronic Arts, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, and Samsung. The OpenCL standard was completed in nearly six months time by the working group in order to be ready for the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next version Apple's operating system that is expected to ship early next year.

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