[Openicc] GSoC & oyranos

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Cyrille Berger wrote:
>>
>> OpenCL is currently being pushed by vendors interested in promoting
>> their proprietary hardware and proprietary systems.
> Huh ? OpenCL is now an open standard from the khronos group (the same guys
> behind OpenGL), which is indeed supported by most hardware vendors, but then
> we are speaking GPUs there, so at some point you have to use the hardware from
> those proprietary vendor. Nvidia's CUDA and the ATI/AMD's MetalWhatever thing
> where proprietary technologies that are now deprecated in favor of OpenCL.

There are many such open specifications for proprietary 
implementations.

>> In the time it takes for OpenCL to be independently implement>
>> I am unable to find an open-source OpenCL implementation or any actual
>> project to produce an open-sourced free OpenCL implementation.
> Mesa has an initial implementation of OpenCL.

I am not able to find any reference of this on the Mesa web site and a 
Google search of "Mesa OpenCL" turns up zero actual hits (there are 
748,000 hits for "Mesa OpenGL").  Do you have a reference for this?

There are some hits on the GCC mailing list from a month or two ago 
where some GCC developers where talking (thinking) about implementing 
GCC support for OpenCL.

>> that it can be used in Linux and *BSD the CPU vendors may very well 
>> have integrated GPU capabilities, with full compiler support.
> Well that's what OpenCL is for... GPU has a very specific design, you can't
> expect to run the same type of program on a CPU on a GPU, you have to write
> your code in a specific way, and bend to the graphics pipeline, that's what
> OpenCL provides for you.

If enough time elapses, the open source world may end up with a much 
better integrated solution than existing OpenCL.  In the mean time, 
the primary use of OpenCL is likely to be in PDAs, cell phones, and 
cars.

If OpenCL library impementations come in binary form (or restricted 
source code) from vendors like Nvidia then they may be limited to one 
vendor's hardware, and are not suitable for use from GPLed 
applications.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/