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This depends on the degree to which the underlying hardware remains compatible across generations. nVidia can sell monster GPU systems today to run 5-year-old CUDA code faster without any recompilation or other mandatory engineering work. I don’t know whether this is possible with direct hardware access.

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Intel's OneAPI (rebranded OpenCL) can allegedly do this.

It also claims to do this across radically different architectures like FPGA and all I can say to that is "I find that very hard to believe"

Yeah it is in practice not really true. Maybe after hacking the code you can watch it compile for _days_ and then perform probably worse than a GPU without extreme tuning, which removes the point anyway.

Rebranded SYCL, if it was rebranded OpenCL, it wouldn't even be worth a 2nd look.

Depends... sometimes its built specifically to kernels.

One common instance is, blender's Cycles renderer. Every time there is a new NVIDIA GPU. It needs to be recompiled to support it. Sometimes that also requires a new CUDA version to be able to do it. CUDA versions over the years have deprecated different operations and what not.

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