vuda

My personal take on this is that OpenCL is not the way forward, that deployment is going to be on Vulkan and likely WebGPU. But there is an enormous gap in the ecosystem, as Vulkan is very low-level and GLSL is a primitive language for writing compute kernels (though it can be done in theory). I think the OpenCL people get that, and have listed clvk and clspv on their roadmap. That gives considerably better options for actually running compute workloads than crossing one's fingers and hoping that the GPU vendors will implement the spec out of a sense of pity for the spec writers. Another similar project I learned about recently is vuda[1]. Another project to watch closely is JAX/MLIR, which promises to run Tensorflow workloads directly on Vulkan. In that ecosystem, it's not clear at all what value an OpenCL layer would add. I have a blog