Hacker News Reader

Full thread

amelius

Apple is known to actively discourage general purpose computing. Better try a different vendor.

View on HN

idk about “known” considering they basically created OpenGL

That was SGI.

I think that's a typo. Apple created OpenCL.

OpenGL then added compute shaders to make twice the implementation cost for the same feature.

Yeah autocorrect doesn’t like me this week

If OpenGL is your most up-to-date reference for Apple supporting general purpose computing then I think it absolutely emphasizes how little work they've put in.

Metal is not particularly bad.

Metal is neither a general-purpose compute API or a known example of Apple supporting it. If you consider Metal "general purpose" then so is DirectX or even Playstation and Nintendo shaders simply because you can sum matrices.

Accelerate framework might be what you're looking for here, but by most accounts that hasn't improved very much recently. And even still, Accelerate is no analog for OpenCL or CUDA.

Metal is basically equivalently powerful to CUDA, so I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. I mean, it's literally Apple's CUDA but for their own hardware.

Preferably one that sells computers, not fashion statements.

It's not a fashion statement, it's a fucking deathwish

Reply on news.ycombinator.com