OpenCL has had a C++ variant for a while. But it is like you said: The consortium members, especially NVIDIA, did not do thing properly, either half-heartedly or in an intentionally broken manner.
Always blamming NVidia, when Intel and AMD never did anything to properly support it.
>Always blamming NVidia
As LLM, AI takes over the heated topic of discussions on HN, it is hard not to notice the tone on blaming Nvidia for everything. Both Hardware and Software.
I think we should be blaming the OS platform actors and user communities for letting the lunatics run the asylum (hw vendors dictating sw). And then MS & Apple both went ant did their own proprietary stuff.
Re:AMD's CDNA 3 Compute Architecture
by imtringued on Monday December 18, 2023 @08:16AM
(#38681978)
OpenCL 2.0 was ignored because implementing shared virtual memory was mandatory, but it simply isn't possible to implement without cache coherence all the way into the GPU memory. Now that Intel has developed their own GPUs, they have gone out of their way to completely ignore SVM and went with their own proprietary USM extension of OpenCL and the Intel driver developers themselves said SVM is difficult to get right. Intel and AMD were the only ones implementing OpenCL 2.0 and the SVM implementation by AMD was basically unusable.
OpenCL 3.0 got rid of the mandatory features of OpenCL 2.0 that nobody was willing to implement.
Basically a wall of text going around that Intel and AMD never delivered anything in OpenCL that would make developers actually care.
They only needed to make something half as usable as CUDA, in polyglot support and graphical development tooling for GPGPU.
I was once in a Khronos panel webminar in HPC, where no one in the panel understood the relevance of Fortran support in OpenCL, then no wonder Fortran workloads get deployed with CUDA.
The attempts to bring C++ to it never were properly done, and that is why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.0 rebranded.