While nVidia actually support OpenCL on it’s GPU, but not on main CPU, ATI offers it’s own drivers that support main CPU but not it’s GPU! Anyway ATI’s GPU are not really ceonceived for GPGPU and wil llag far far behind nVidia’s on real OpenCL implementations!
The purpose of OpenCL is to enable code to run on both CPU and GPUs (even a mix of ATI and nVidia), not to enable to run either in CPU (what’s the novelty???) or restricted to a propretary GPU!!!
At this time, CUDA seems to be the technology path to follow before switching to OpenCL in 2010 or 2011…
I’m very about excited about OpenCL (on ATI or NVIDIA). Can you provide me more information (tests, benchmarks) that confirms that current ATI GPU gen is not build for GPGPU application, please ?
ATI Radeon 4xxxx is limited by it’s inability to support Shared Memory on it’s core, It’s pure brutal processing power, but without a real GPGPU orientation.
Consequence is it’s really efficient on simple matrix multiplication or FFT, but totally unable to run CPU-oriented C source-code at the speed a nVidia 8xxx/9xxx or later could!
That’s it!