Is available OpenCL on iOS

Question

I found this thread on the forum Are either the IPad or IPhone capable of OpenCL? but is it quite old. Also, what I can gather that OpenCL is available to system libraries of iOS but not to public. Is there more info in this regard or any update ?

Answer 1

Even with using OpenCL as private framework, on iOS it won't give you the benefits of GPU ( or others like DSPs/FPGAs if existing ). It just gives you multiple cores available on arm processor. I ran the below code to verify the OpenCL devices accessible in iOS and OS X.

Output on iOS

ARM CPU Device

Output on OS X

Radeon HD 4670
Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz

Source with error checks excluded. Using OpenCL headers available(1) and linking OpenCL from (/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS8.1.sdk/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks)

#include "OpenCL/cl.h" #include <iostream>  cl_context_properties prop[] = { CL_CONTEXT_PLATFORM, 0, 0 };     //get num of platforms cl_uint num; cl_int err = clGetPlatformIDs(0, 0, &num);   //get each platform cl_platform_id *platforms = new cl_platform_id[num]; err = clGetPlatformIDs(num, platforms, &num);  //create context for platform prop[1] = (cl_context_properties) platforms[0]; cl_context context = clCreateContextFromType(prop, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, NULL, NULL, &err);   //get num devices size_t numDevices=0; clGetContextInfo(context, CL_CONTEXT_DEVICES, 0, NULL, &numDevices); cl_device_id *devices = new cl_device_id[ numDevices ];  //get every device clGetContextInfo(context, CL_CONTEXT_DEVICES, numDevices, devices, 0);  //get info of every device for( int idx=0; idx < numDevices; ++idx) {      size_t bufSize=0;     clGetDeviceInfo(devices[idx], CL_DEVICE_NAME, 0, NULL, &bufSize);     if( bufSize > 0 ) {         char* devName = new char[ bufSize ];         clGetDeviceInfo(devices[idx], CL_DEVICE_NAME, bufSize, devName, 0);         std::cout << "Device Name: " << devName << '\n';     } } 

Suggestion: As of now, we will need to use either OpenGL(2) or Accelerate framework(3). Still not sure, for what reason/purpose OpenCL is copied in as private framework on iPhone.