At its World-Wide Developers Conference Apple introduced Core Image as a feature of its upcoming Tiger release. Core Image is a framework for image processing on the GPU using a modified stream processing paradigm. Core Image is an interesting computational framework for offloading some general-purpose computations on to the GPU. It appears to be the first commercial effort to offer a general image computing environment for GPUs. The library comes with 100 basic plugins, called “Image Units”, and can be extended by developers. The computing model is based on stream processing, where each kernel is expressed in a high-level language and computes a result image based on some number of input images. The kernels can be strung together in arbitrary image computation “graphs”, in a model similar to that described by Michael Shantzis in his 1994 paper A Model for Efficient and Flexible Image Computing. Registered Apple Developers (free registration) can access a pre-release version of Core Image.