Thursday, August 14, 2008

OpenCL, DirectX Compute Shader, CUDA, CAL, Larrabee,  OpenGL 3.0, and a neat demo by Jon Olick

A few of the presentations this week have covered Larrabee, both in terms of architecture and conceptually.  A talk today mentioned that Larrabee could submit draw calls to itself, which I hadn't considered before.  Even if it fails to live up as a rasterizer, there will still be plenty of market for it as a compute-enabling device.

A high level overview and sample code of both OpenCL and DirectX Compute Shaders were presented, and I'm fairly excited.  They're quite different approaches, with different goals, and I whole heartedly hope they both work out.

I've used CUDA a bit in the past, but I didn't know until today that AMD had updated their offering from CTM to a new higher-level api called CAL.  I'll have to check it out next time I have an ATi board to play with.

I've already said I was disappointed with what was missing in OpenGL 3.0. What I didn't say is that I'm excited about working with the new extensions and seeing what I can do.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I thought AMD was backing OpenCL etc now instead of going the proprietary route? Maybe my info is outdated. :)
/aav

Andrew said...

I think they're going to, but OpenCL won't be finished for some time, and they needed something to compete with CUDA.