Easy, initially focused on C99 dialect, no tooling for C++ and Fortran, only came up with SPIRV, after noticing the adoption PTX was having among alternative compiler backends, C++ support came too late for anyone to care.
Speaking of caring, Intel and AMD never produced a ecosystem around OpenCL in IDE tooling, GPGPU debugging and libraries that could rival CUDA.
While on mobile devices, Google never cared about OpenCL, producing its own proprietary dialect, Renderscript. Now deprecated and replaced by Vulkan compute.
> Speaking of caring, Intel and AMD never produced a ecosystem around OpenCL in IDE tooling, GPGPU debugging and libraries that could rival CUDA.
This is a critical step for the adoption of any technology - developer ergonomics should never be neglected, even more so when your competition doesn't.
Again - you can blame Intel and AMD for not implementing it, but Apple was the primary designer. It's either Intel and AMD's duty to add support for a spec they never asked for, or Apple's responsibility to integrate COTS hardware with their aftermarket software. It's revisionist to dump the blame for Apple and Khronos' spec on the people who designed the hardware they wanted to target. You can't shake your fist and blame Ford when your F-150 isn't compatible with an aftermarket radio.
It would turn out to be a moot point because Apple would protest both Vulkan and OpenCL for petty political reasons anyways. But blaming Intel and AMD for not implementing a standard they didn't design is pretty rich. It feels to me that Apple and Microsoft are more to blame, since they were actually the ones with the incentive to improve on software and API integration - which (again) they both abandoned because neither of them treated CUDA as a serious threat.
And of course - it's not like Apple actually gained anything from all this. Protesting Khronos helps them raise their moat... and that's just about it. They aren't competing with Nvidia by striking out on their own, they aren't surpassing the featureset of OpenCL, and they aren't planning a suitable replacement. It seems pretty blatantly obvious that Apple changed their mind about the whole "working with the industry" plan they had, reflected in not just their abandonment of OpenCL but their rejection of all Khronos specs and potential alternatives, wholesale.
OpenCL is a pretty decent hpc spec. It's too bad it never reached critical mass.
Easy, initially focused on C99 dialect, no tooling for C++ and Fortran, only came up with SPIRV, after noticing the adoption PTX was having among alternative compiler backends, C++ support came too late for anyone to care.
Speaking of caring, Intel and AMD never produced a ecosystem around OpenCL in IDE tooling, GPGPU debugging and libraries that could rival CUDA.
While on mobile devices, Google never cared about OpenCL, producing its own proprietary dialect, Renderscript. Now deprecated and replaced by Vulkan compute.
> Speaking of caring, Intel and AMD never produced a ecosystem around OpenCL in IDE tooling, GPGPU debugging and libraries that could rival CUDA.
This is a critical step for the adoption of any technology - developer ergonomics should never be neglected, even more so when your competition doesn't.
Again - you can blame Intel and AMD for not implementing it, but Apple was the primary designer. It's either Intel and AMD's duty to add support for a spec they never asked for, or Apple's responsibility to integrate COTS hardware with their aftermarket software. It's revisionist to dump the blame for Apple and Khronos' spec on the people who designed the hardware they wanted to target. You can't shake your fist and blame Ford when your F-150 isn't compatible with an aftermarket radio.
It would turn out to be a moot point because Apple would protest both Vulkan and OpenCL for petty political reasons anyways. But blaming Intel and AMD for not implementing a standard they didn't design is pretty rich. It feels to me that Apple and Microsoft are more to blame, since they were actually the ones with the incentive to improve on software and API integration - which (again) they both abandoned because neither of them treated CUDA as a serious threat.
And of course - it's not like Apple actually gained anything from all this. Protesting Khronos helps them raise their moat... and that's just about it. They aren't competing with Nvidia by striking out on their own, they aren't surpassing the featureset of OpenCL, and they aren't planning a suitable replacement. It seems pretty blatantly obvious that Apple changed their mind about the whole "working with the industry" plan they had, reflected in not just their abandonment of OpenCL but their rejection of all Khronos specs and potential alternatives, wholesale.