OpenCL is slowly catching up, C++ templates are an extension at the moment, see http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/assets/cplus_kernel_language.docx



Bryan Catanzaro (bryan.catanzaro@gmail.com) on 2/9/12 wrote:
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>David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 2/9/12 wrote:
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>>pk (pk@notmyrealaddress.com) on 2/9/12 wrote:
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>>>David, the quote above is quite a heavy statement. Could you elaborate?
>>>
>>>Nvidia would certainly argue that CUDA gives you the absolute best performance
>>>for the highly parallel applications often run in HPC environments, and those people
>>>benefit greatly from it. Are you arguing that CUDA will just >stay confined to the HPC space?
>>
>>What is the performance of CUDA code on an AMD GPU? Or Knight's Corner? I'm pretty
>>sure the performance is very bad compared to the alternatives : )
>>
>>I agree that CUDA is acceptable where you want to be tied to NV's hardware. For HPC, that might be fine.
>>
>>But for consumer applications, you need GPU acceleration on ALL hardware platforms.
>>So if you want CUDA, you probably also need OpenCL, etc.
>>
>>At that point, why would you ever bother with CUDA in the first place?
>>
>>My point is that proprietary programming models that are tied to hardware with
>>small marketshare are stupid where alternatives exist. Initially there was no alternative to CUDA. Now there is.
>>
>>David
>
>Have you used OpenCL? CUDA has a lot of important features that OpenCL does not,
>C++ templates being the biggest (which are incredibly useful in parallel programming),
>and CUDA is also extraordinarily simpler to use. Hello World in OpenCL is about 1000 lines of code. In CUDA it's 10.
>