hobold (hobold@vectorizer.org) on 8/19/10 wrote:
---------------------------
>Steve Underwood (steveu@coppice.org) on 8/18/10 wrote:
>---------------------------
>[...]
>>It took a lot of time for people to get the best out of hand shuffling
>>things with SSSE3, and the next generation core made this complexity something that
>>needs to be ripped out of the code. AAAHHHHH!
>>
>
>http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/2010_siggraph_bof_opencl/OpenCL-BOF-Intel-SIGGRAPH-Jul10.pdf
>
>Granted, this approach will not give you the equivalent of fully hand tuned performance,
>but it can come reasonably close. And better yet, it abstracts from the gazillion
>existing SSE variants and the upcoming AVX and Larrabee ISA variations. I wonder
>if that will end up being a more significant advantage than the abstraction from
>completely different hardware types by different vendors.

This stuff looks encouraging, but as far as I can tell the tools which produced these nice results are not available to developers outside Intel. So, it remains to be seen how general purpose they might be. I'd certainly like a chance to play with them.

I think your last point it spot on. If Intel were a total monopoly, it would still have a huge amount to gain if opencl works out as well as we hope.