PathScale plans CUDA killer

April 28, 2010 | 10:16

Tags: #compiler #cuda #fermi #gpgpu #gpu-offload #opencl

Companies: #nvidia #open-source #pathscale

Compiler specialist PathScale believes that its newly announced GPGPU technology can take on OpenCL and CUDA - and win.

The company's outspoken chief technology officer Chris Bergström spoke to the guys over at THINQ about the PathScale optimised GPU compiler, which he describes as "a very similar codebase to what Nvidia built for their Nvidia toolkit" only - so he believes - significantly better.

Describing Nvidia's CUDA programming model as "antiquated, dare I say crappy" and being "very expensive for people who write large bodies of code," Bergström believes - strongly - that his company's "third evolution of offloading - the fully automatic solution where zero code changes" will prove capable of beating both CUDA and OpenCL in the long run.

Bergström is certainly confident of his company's abilities, explaining that PathScale represents "a situation where we think we can build something better than them [Nvidia], and basically kick their ass."

While compilers are the company's bread and butter, PathScale is also looking to push open source and help to develop better GPGPU drivers for the open source community - so much so, in fact, that the company is offering free Nvidia Fermi graphics cards to "qualified open source developers and researchers" looking to write open drivers and compilers.

While details of the company's technology is still a closely guarded secret, PathScale is currently running its CUDA-killer through an alpha testing period - and Bergström has promised that whatever technology comes out of the other end will be open source and freely licensed.

Are you excited to see if PathScale can stir up the GPGPU market, or is yet another standard just going to fragment the marketplace and lead to slower adoption of GPU offload technology? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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