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Is native Macintosh/AMD/OpenCL support available?

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Kenji Kono on 23 Aug 2019

Commented: Kenji Kono on 24 Aug 2019

We are starting to plan some hardware purchases. We are primarily a Macintosh shop (a lot of the microscopy folks are used to Macs from back in the day) and the iMac Pro and soon-to-be-released Mac Pro look fairly powerful.

However, it seems all Macs use AMD graphics and I have found references that Matlab requires third-party tools (?hacks?) to exploit the GPU's. Is that still the case? Thanks

References:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/440797-support-for-hip-and-or-opencl-gpu-acceleration
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/25973-matlab-opencl
https://code.google.com/archive/p/opencl-toolbox/

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Kenji Kono on 24 Aug 2019

I tend to define "Macintosh" as both the hardware and the software. And since Macintosh hardware only uses AMD GPUs, at this time, then by my definition "full" support would include AMD support.

BUT, i see the other point of view. Personally, I'd rather Apple gave us more options in GPUs, but talking to Apple can be like talking to a brick wall. :)

Walter Roberson on 24 Aug 2019

I am told that OpenCL is a fairly loose framework, with a lot of parts that are optional, and that there are considerable differences in what is implemented by different vendors and even different models. Because of that, it is not practical to create just one OpenCL version -- or at least not an optimized one: you would either have to create a number of different versions or else create one that only used the features that all the important vendors agreed on the implementation of.

Kenji Kono on 24 Aug 2019

Fair enough; but I am (selfishly) focussing only on Macintosh, and Apple only offers a few models of GPUs at any given moment (for better or worse)

That said, what Apple will do in the future is anyone's guess. So I can see why maintaining OpenCL support on Macintosh could be a problem.

Thanks!

Accepted Answer

Jason Ross on 23 Aug 2019

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https://ww2.mathworks.cn/matlabcentral/answers/477269-is-native-macintosh-amd-opencl-support-available#answer_388771

MATLAB only supports nVidia GPUs and CUDA for GPU calculations through the Parallel Computing Toolbox. The list of supported GPU families can be found here

With Mojave (Mac OSX 10.14), nVidia CUDA drivers are no longer functional. See this Answer. Since the new Mac Pro will only support Mojave, and the iMac Pro only has AMD graphics, these will not be usable by the Parallel Computing Toolbox for GPU computations.

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