zlacker

Is my impression wrong, that people understood the need for OCL only after CUDA had already cornered and strangled the market?

>>Avaman+(OP)
You're mostly right. CUDA was a "sleeper product" that existed early-on but didn't see serious demand until later. OpenCL was Khronos Group's hedged bet against the success of CUDA; it was assumed that they would invest in it more as demand for GPGPU increased. After 10 years though, OpenCL wasn't really positioned to compete and CUDA was more fully-featured than ever. Adding insult to injury, OS manufacturers like Microsoft and Apple started to avoid standardized GPU libraries in favor of more insular native APIs. By the time demand for CUDA materialized, OpenCL had already been left for dead by most of the involved parties.

>>Avaman+(OP)
I attended a Webminar from Khronos were no one in the panel understood why the research community would want anything beyond C to program GPUs.

Meanwhile NVidia was adding C++, Fortran, PTX, supporting other programming language communities trying to target GPUS (Java, .NET, Haskell,..).

Making it as easy to debug GPUs as modern graphical debuggers for CPUs, building libraries,...

Intel, and AMD together with Khronos did this to themselves.