AFDS11: Microsoft Announces C++ AMP, Competitor to OpenCL

You'll probably lose some performance, but you can also make disproportionately large productivity gains. Performance loss generally isn't the largest limitation, but rather expressivity. That is, by providing higher-level abstractions, you're also saying "this is how you need to write your computations." In other words, you define a programming model. If the problem you want to solve does not cleanly map to that programming model, then you can't use it.

We've been playing this game every since Fortran was first invented. Yeah, you probably could get better performance if you wrote your application one level of abstraction lower, but once you get a sufficiently sophisticated compiler, the performance benefit is marginal compared to the programming time and effort. Further, libraries tend not to be written directly in assembly, and will often rely on other libraries. I could see implementing something similar to what MS showed purely as a C++ library.

Not entirely true. They are ditching it as a java write-once, run-everywhere for the web platform. Windows Phone 7 relies heavily on it/WPF. And in a corporate environment where everyone will be running IEx, it makes sense to develop applications in it.

Because that would make it easier to port things away from Windows.

OpenCL is equivalent to OpenGL -- runs on Windows, Linux, etc. (even coming to smartphones soon).

C++ AMP is based on the DirectCompute APIs in DirectX 11.

My $.02 -- maybe the target audience for C++ AMP is different than the target audience for OpenCL. Before it was released, I really liked the idea of OpenCL but in practice it doesn't really deliver very well (performance-wise) compared to alternatives like nVidia CUDA, AMD APP (formerly Stream), and DirectCompute.

This isn't something that fell out of a tree yesterday. They have been working on this for a while, more than likely since before OpenCL looked like it was going to take off. In fact they already ship a GPU compute API as part of DirectX(compute shaders). My guess is they are just pulling that out of DirectX to make a stand alone project.

Examples are indeed thin on the ground but they do seem finally to me making a serious effort to produce a standards-compliant browser. Maybe I just want to find something nice say about an old, toothless bully.

Sure, that's been their M.O. since the beginning. But I thought I saw inklings of understanding there that maybe they could do just as well being the best implementor of a shared standard, growing the industry for everybody in the process. Too bad they still seem to see everything as a zero-sum game.

Ugh, I came into contact with Business Bullshit today where my manager didn't want to warn our customers after we found that one of our sites was installing malware on their computers because it could hurt profits.