> We should not support hang-vidia Hmm... How often did it hang on you to deserve the disparaging moniker?
I understand that you may dislike the fact that the good, fast drivers NVIDIA provide for Linux are proprietary, and the open source drivers suck in comparison. Is it a good reason to disparage the quality of their products? > with our wallet by writing code that can only > effectively run on their cards. Instead one should use OpenCL that is an open > standard Don't mix things up. CUDA is NVIDIA's parallel processing architecture. It comes with an SDK that has been available for Linux from the very beginning. OpenCL is a "framework for writing programs". NVIDIA were instrumental in development of OpenCL, CUDA supports OpenCL, the two are not exclusive. If you have a CUDA system you can write in OpenCL or directly in C, Fortran, Python, Java, etc., using the SDK. As far as I am concerned, it's irrelevant - both the OpenCL implementation and the SDK come from NVIDIA. I mentioned CUDA because it is a relevant, and currently dominant, HW *architecture* for parallel processing, and parallelism seemed to me relevant to the Shimon's requirement that he called "number-crunching". I do not know anything about the actual workload or whether it can benefit from CUDA. If Shimon decides to go down that road he may decide later whether to use OpenCL or some other language to write his code - it's a separate topic. > which is supported fine by ATI cards And ATI are better than NVIDIA how? IIRC, their drivers are also proprietary, and open-source drivers (Radeon, etc.) are not as good. The difference may be less drastic (for some ATI cards) compared to the open-source NVIDIA drivers, but in principle, is there a difference? In terms of GPGPU stuff, to NVIDIA's CUDA ATI have Stream, and they have a Stream SDK and an OpenCL SDK, which seems to me quite parallel to NVIDIA's offerings. I'll admit I haven't looked up the license details, so if you check and say that ATI opensourced everything I'll be very happy indeed. > and hopefully will soon have an open-source implementation: Sorry, but practical considerations may trump ideology, at least until the latter is adequately supported. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
