Thursday, January 07, 2010

Pessimistic article about OpenCL

Compilers and More: OpenCL Promises and Potential

from the article:
So let's accept and even celebrate OpenCL for what it is, and not try to make it what it can't be. There's danger is raising expectations too high, or claiming too much (a la Bernie Madoff); OpenCL can be influential and succeed without replacing other parallel languages. To correct Steve Job's quote: "While OpenCL is very similar in many respects to NVIDIA's CUDA, it adds features to take advantage of other targets; and though it's quite complex, it has the potential to deliver very high performance, and is much easier than trying to map your computation into OpenGL or graphics primitives." Hype I can agree with; but then, I'm not the Apple CEO.