NVIDIA Privately Releases OpenCL Linux Driver

[Kamikaze321]

Good question. We're only writing the closed source driver ourselves, and making use of existing closed source code in several places. We don't have any plans to make that code public in any form.

Ofocurse not, if you steal code from other programms then you cant open source "your own" peace of software, thats the only reason. I bet many parts of Ati closed driver are owned by someone else. If Ati release the code, they will be sued by several companies.

I can imagine that to clean up their driver will take many months and the driver will be slower so ati will never be able to beat the closed source driver of other companies e.g Nvidia.

[bridgman]

One of the reasons OpenCL is so attractive is that it gives a general purpose solution for speeding up typical desktop operations as well :

http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/59306/opencl-technology-may-speed-snow-leopard

[Louise]

http://www.nvidia.com/page/apple.html Maybe apple is big enough paying customer?

Maybe this is a stupid question, but what will Apple be using OpenCL for?

I know that Apple is one of the key drivers of OpenCL, but I have never seen an Apple server in a data center.

... Except for MAC Mini. They are quite popular for webservers.

[suokko]

Why does nvidia support opencl with such enthusiasm? I would have expected them to delay their opencl drivers as long as possible to gain a competitive advantage with cuda market share. Not like i'm complaining though, just wondering.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/apple.html Maybe apple is big enough paying customer?

[Pahanilmanlintu]

Why does nvidia support opencl with such enthusiasm? I would have expected them to delay their opencl drivers as long as possible to gain a competitive advantage with cuda market share. Not like i'm complaining though, just wondering.

[DanL]

Nvidia is always first.

And what OpenCL programs are you running on your nvidia card?

[Louise]

Good question. We're only writing the closed source driver ourselves, and making use of existing closed source code in several places. We don't have any plans to make that code public in any form.

That makes sense to speed up the development and lower the cost.

On the open source side, we expect to help with writing the open source Gallium3D driver, and our understanding is that TG/VMWare is working on an open source OpenCL driver which will run over Gallium3D.

So the open source version is really the crown jewel

[bridgman]

Good question. We're only writing the closed source driver ourselves, and making use of existing closed source code in several places. We don't have any plans to make that code public in any form.

On the open source side, we expect to help with writing the open source Gallium3D driver, and our understanding is that TG/VMWare is working on an open source OpenCL driver which will run over Gallium3D.

[Louise]

I don't understand why AMD would develop a closed source and an open source OpenCL driver.

If they write the driver, they control the copyright, so they can release the source as GPLv2 or GPLv3, and still use the same source for their closed source drivers.

id Software does that with their game engines.

You can buy a license to e.g. the Quake 3 engine, which have been released as GPLv2, but by buying a license from id, you can keep your changes closed source.

[hax0r]

Cool, nvidia opens another can of whoopass.