Comment by talldayo

Comment by talldayo 10 months ago

2 replies

It is entirely Apple's fault that they rejected OpenCL to replace it with a proprietary library. If this was an implementation or specification problem, Apple had every opportunity to shape the project in their own image. They cannot possibly argue that this was done for any other reason than greed, considering they themselves laid the framework for such a project. Without Apple's cooperation, Open Source GPGPU libraries can not reasonably target every client. Apple knows they wield this power, and considering their history it's both illogical and willfully ignorant to assume they're not doing this as part of a broader trend of monopolistic abuse.

Having shut out Nvidia as part of a petty feud, Apple realized they could force any inferior or nonfree CUDA alternative onto their developers no matter how unfinished, slow or bad it is. They turned away from the righteous and immediately obvious path to complicate things for developers that wanted to ship cross-platform apps instead of Mac-only ones.

pjmlp 10 months ago

The fact is that Intel, AMD and even Google (coming up with Renderscript), didn't gave a shit about making OpenCL something developers cared about.

  • talldayo 10 months ago

    That's not their job. CUDA wasn't "something developers cared about" for 11 fucking years and now look at where we are. If the OEMs focused on doing their job and implementing their standards, then neither of us would be trying to assign blame in the first place.

    The worst part is, now that Apple has gone all-in on incomplete and proprietary alternatives, nobody has won. Apple successfully applied their monopoly abuse to a market that they have completely captive. And we want to blame... checks clipboard Intel and AMD, for having renewed interest in a successful decade-old concept.