What are you skeptical of? I believe the problem this is solving is a framework that's not CUDA that allows low level access to the hardware, makes it easy to write kernels, and is not Nvidia only. If you watch the video you can write directly in asm if you need to. You have full control if you want it. But it provides primitives and higher level objects that handle common cases.
I'm a novice in the area, but Chris is well respected in this area and cares a lot of about performance.
I'm a novice in the area, but Chris is well respected in this area and cares a lot of about performance.