Parallel Processing and GPGPU support in Snow Leopard and Windows 7

Going through 2008, hardware vendors like Intel, NVidia and AMD buzzed off the terms Multi Core Processing and GPGPU support several times over various keynotes and presentations. While we had multi-core processors for last few years, none of the current operating systems can leverage that hardware power rightfully in multi-threaded applications. On the other hand, GPGPU (General-purpose computing on Graphics Processing Unit) is relatively new term, and signifies the use of GPU in common tasks which are traditionally meant for CPU. And that’s too largely unused in general computing apart from those developer junkies who like to play with codes.

Two biggest players in the worldwide consumer operating system market, Microsoft and Apple, recently announced their interests on these emerging technologies to provide way better user experiences by using prowess of latest hardware line. In PDC’08, Microsoft made it clear that they’re definitely tweaking Windows 7 to use multi-core processors more efficiently and the latest publicly released build of Windows 7 shows significant performance increase than Vista with newer processors having more than one core. In WWDC’09, Apple presented their current implementation of Multi Core Processing and GPGPU support in upcoming version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. After the event, people who got Developer Preview of the operating system appreciated more fluency in terms of processing power and user interface in comparison to its previous version, namely Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

While it’s great to see that modern operating systems are going to use properly what they have under the hood, a typical comparison between efficiency levels is obvious.

Windows 7

Windows 7 is going to be the best operating system Microsoft has ever released since its existence. Unlike the vaporous hype Vista had till its release back in 2007, Windows 7 will definitely going to hit the target for Microsoft. Coming into the topic, the 32bit architecture of Windows, namely win32 was never optimised (better to say meant) for parallel processing from multiple cores. From Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie’s own words,

“Win32 was never designed for highly concurrent, asynchronous processing”. “Parallelism requires adjustments at every level of the stack. It involves the repartitioning of different tasks to different layers. . . . So look for a rebalancing of roles and runtimes. We need to formalize that in the operating system. Expect their first pieces in the next generation of Windows.”

Advertently, as some people were already suggesting (and are still suggesting), a complete rewrite of Windows core can only bring a solution. But MS is afraid of losing support for millions of PC that runs legacy software and hardware and since Vista shook the ground beneath their feet, they’re most eager to gain a fair share with Win 7 first. But, users need not to worry about that, Microsoft is already tweaking as much as possible keeping the current Windows core model intact and early benchmarks have shown notable extensions in performance.

In the graphics front, Windows AERO UI is already hardware accelerated and the introduction of WDDM 1.1 promises greater augmentations. Graphic card manufacturers like NVidia and AMD announced newer drivers supporting the new version of WDDM even before the actual release of the new OS. Still there’s no word on GPGPU support in this version of Windows. There are no words on GPGPU support in Windows 7 and it’s still not clear if Microsoft already implicated the technology within their new OS. I don’t think there will be much of that kind of support (if any) and MS will introduce it with DirectX 11.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

WWDC’09 saw the official release announcement of Snow Leopard, featuring Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. Keeping up with their tradition of hypocritical Microsoft bashing, they didn’t forget to ridicule Vista and 7 in saying about some increasing complexities. While these claims are totally idiotic, Apple’s introduction of above technologies is simply great.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD for short) is the Apple’s incarnation of native multi-core support in OS level. They want Snow Leopard to control the threads generated by various applications rather than letting those apps to do it. This gives greater control to the OS and makes it stable & efficient to use the available system resources. In their own words,

“A new technology called Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage of multicore systems by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that utilize all the power of multicore systems.”

That means everything from opening a finder window to backing up in Time Machine will be multi-threaded and the threads are in turn processed by multiple cores at the same time. While this sounds really cool, user installed third-party applications need to be GCD enabled to take advantage of it.

OpenCL is Apple’s foray into GPGPU and they have all the major graphic card manufactures with them for that cause. It stands for Open Computing Language which is based on C and easier to implement for developers than a whole new coding system. As Apple puts it,

“With graphics processors surpassing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL in Snow Leopard is a technology that makes it possible for developers to tap the vast computing power currently in the graphics processor and use it for any application.”

The everlasting feud between MS and Apple is going to take an interesting turn as they’re both waiting to release their brand new OS in a month’s difference. While Apple is quite clear with the features they are bringing to access these two current technologies, MS is relatively quiet with their part in this. I hope something significant is really brewing on Redmond that’ll blow others out of water on release. It’s too early to tell since both of the releases are at least 3.5 months away. Personally, I’m quite attracted by what Apple’s going to offer soon and thinking about buying a MacBook Pro in recent future. Let it come October, let the technology to unleash the prowess of processing power.