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"I wonder if that's intentional on NVIDIA's part." I think that's a reasonable guess. NVIDIA only supports OpenCL 1.2 (and it took them about 6 years to get th

"I wonder if that's intentional on NVIDIA's part." I think that's a reasonable guess. NVIDIA only supports OpenCL 1.2 (and it took them about 6 years to get there from 1.0, while other vendors were at 2.x). While I don't think NVIDIA ever outright stated OpenCL was on the back burner, their support clearly waned, which devs noticed (https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2012-09-10/nvidias-industry-leading-support-for-opencl/ https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2012-09-10/nvidias-industry-...). As for why...well, why should NVIDIA participate? They don't have anything to gain when they already have CUDA dominating the industry.

intoverflow2 9y ago
> They don't have anything to gain when they already have CUDA dominating the industry Everyone working in it seems to agree there are good reasons for it dominating. Just easier to work with overall.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  You're implying OpenCL being broken somehow. Is it broken in any way?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bostonpete 9y ago
    I don't see how "easier to work with" implies "broken".
    - apetresc 9y ago
      The GP was saying CUDA was "easier to work with", not OpenCL. OpenCL's broken-ness then presumably is that it's hard to work with.
- dom0 9y ago
  In the long run every monopoly hurts badly. Puzzling that people think it's good for GPGU, with the x86 fiasco next door.
  - hvs 9y ago
    (Most) people don't make decisions based on overarching theories of what's good for everyone. They need to solve a problem as easy as possible and most people feel that CUDA is easier to use than OpenCL. Plus, NVidia has been a leader in this space. Also, this isn't a monopoly, OpenCL exists.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      And given that CUDA is essentially free and you simply pay for the hardware it is actually not such a bad deal. Economies of scale are such that if you can run your workload on gaming hardware you're going to get incredible performance for very little money.
      - p0nce 9y ago
        NVIDIA will prevent you to buy gaming hardware and push you into buying the 10x more expensive ones. There are 2 NVIDIA drivers. It turns out pinned memory transfers are 2x faster with the Tesla driver (vs the Geforce driver). This can matter a lot for some workloads. For some reason you can't use the faster driver with cheap consumer cards. So, in my view NVIDIA is dumbing down performance for OpenCL and CUDA alike, and also slowing down the unavoidable OpenCL adoption.
        shaklee3 9y ago
        Source?
    - dom0 9y ago
      Making decisions and thinking what's good for the ecosystem are two different things. I can still buy nVidia for my company, and think and say at the same time that it's bad. Of course, while it's the cheap consumer garbage ^W^W pro-gaming hardware, the prices are okay, since these are kept in check by AMD. Once we get to the relabelled consumer garbage ^W^W^W professional compute hardware, you pay for it. Dearly. Why? No one that keeps them in check through competition.
- usmeteora 9y ago
  but other than its easier, are there any performance benefits? I think the whole point of Vulkan and particularly SPIR-V, was to offer support for broadened languages including but not limited to Javascript. OpenCL even has go bindings now. SPIR-V allows you to define your own SHADER APIs. Right now, it's alot to learn, but going forward, it hard to ignore the advantages in the functionalities and the broadened support to lower the barrier for learning by increasing the number of languages you can work with OpenCL in, particularly ones that predominately support web dev as we move to cloud developing and hosting AWS and Google Cloud with GPUs. The cloud is a big one here to consider for potential shift in market share because if one group hosting the cloud finds OpenCL to be particularly beneficial, all they have to do is offer support ontop of a stack like Blazing DB, which I imagine a GPU server support stack will be engulfed within cloud platforms backend within 5 years anyways, and suddenly thousands and thousands of companies rely on it and it becomes and industry standard. The shift in a market where cloud hosting exists on GPUs, becomes more based on what large companies who have the money and talent to go in depth and scale out support for OpenCL based functionalities moreso than the barrier every single developer or hip web dev hosting on the cloud is wanting to overcome to invest in low level kernel writing and hardware optimization. Throw the games industry in with Vulkan, with opensource games on PCS always competing with console based games, and I see alot more support in the long run with OpenCL.

intoverflow2 9y ago

> They don't have anything to gain when they already have CUDA dominating the industry Everyone working in it seems to agree there are good reasons for it dominating. Just easier to work with overall.

robert_foss 9y ago
You're implying OpenCL being broken somehow. Is it broken in any way?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bostonpete 9y ago
  I don't see how "easier to work with" implies "broken".
  - apetresc 9y ago
    The GP was saying CUDA was "easier to work with", not OpenCL. OpenCL's broken-ness then presumably is that it's hard to work with.
dom0 9y ago
In the long run every monopoly hurts badly. Puzzling that people think it's good for GPGU, with the x86 fiasco next door.
- hvs 9y ago
  (Most) people don't make decisions based on overarching theories of what's good for everyone. They need to solve a problem as easy as possible and most people feel that CUDA is easier to use than OpenCL. Plus, NVidia has been a leader in this space. Also, this isn't a monopoly, OpenCL exists.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    And given that CUDA is essentially free and you simply pay for the hardware it is actually not such a bad deal. Economies of scale are such that if you can run your workload on gaming hardware you're going to get incredible performance for very little money.
    - p0nce 9y ago
      NVIDIA will prevent you to buy gaming hardware and push you into buying the 10x more expensive ones. There are 2 NVIDIA drivers. It turns out pinned memory transfers are 2x faster with the Tesla driver (vs the Geforce driver). This can matter a lot for some workloads. For some reason you can't use the faster driver with cheap consumer cards. So, in my view NVIDIA is dumbing down performance for OpenCL and CUDA alike, and also slowing down the unavoidable OpenCL adoption.
      - shaklee3 9y ago
        Source?
  - dom0 9y ago
    Making decisions and thinking what's good for the ecosystem are two different things. I can still buy nVidia for my company, and think and say at the same time that it's bad. Of course, while it's the cheap consumer garbage ^W^W pro-gaming hardware, the prices are okay, since these are kept in check by AMD. Once we get to the relabelled consumer garbage ^W^W^W professional compute hardware, you pay for it. Dearly. Why? No one that keeps them in check through competition.
usmeteora 9y ago
but other than its easier, are there any performance benefits? I think the whole point of Vulkan and particularly SPIR-V, was to offer support for broadened languages including but not limited to Javascript. OpenCL even has go bindings now. SPIR-V allows you to define your own SHADER APIs. Right now, it's alot to learn, but going forward, it hard to ignore the advantages in the functionalities and the broadened support to lower the barrier for learning by increasing the number of languages you can work with OpenCL in, particularly ones that predominately support web dev as we move to cloud developing and hosting AWS and Google Cloud with GPUs. The cloud is a big one here to consider for potential shift in market share because if one group hosting the cloud finds OpenCL to be particularly beneficial, all they have to do is offer support ontop of a stack like Blazing DB, which I imagine a GPU server support stack will be engulfed within cloud platforms backend within 5 years anyways, and suddenly thousands and thousands of companies rely on it and it becomes and industry standard. The shift in a market where cloud hosting exists on GPUs, becomes more based on what large companies who have the money and talent to go in depth and scale out support for OpenCL based functionalities moreso than the barrier every single developer or hip web dev hosting on the cloud is wanting to overcome to invest in low level kernel writing and hardware optimization. Throw the games industry in with Vulkan, with opensource games on PCS always competing with console based games, and I see alot more support in the long run with OpenCL.