Linux kernel newbies em português

At last year’s WWDC, Apple introduced their Metal API for iOS 8. A low-level graphics API, Metal was originally designed to bring the benefits of low-level graphics programming to Apple’s mobile operating system. And while we typically don’t think of mobile devices as being GPU-bound, in reality Apple has been packing some relatively powerful GPUs like GXA6850 with what are relatively speaking still fairly weak CPUs, which means Apple has ended up in a situation where they can be CPU-bottlenecked on draw calls.

Metal, despite being the 3rd such low-level API to be introduced, was the first to reach production status. Microsoft’s DirectX 12 is arguably not there yet (Windows 10 is still in testing), and Khronos’s Vulkan was still in its primordial Mantle form at this point in 2014. What this means is that out of all of the vendors, it’s arguably Apple who has the lead time advantage in low-level API development. Which is why for the last year we have been wondering if Metal would stay on iOS, or make the jump to OS X.