I applaud this effort. I hope we can get to a point where a GPU requires as many drivers as a CPU.
I think one of the primary reasons more people don't target GPUs to offload computation, is because it -- most often -- requires proprietary drivers running on the host OS, for it to work (at an acceptable speed).
Imagine if putting an AMD of nVidia card in your box was the same as adding a CPU. If you wanted to write OpenCL to execute on the GPU, thread allocation, memory management etc. for that would be part of an open source OpenCL library, that your application links to, and then you can write OpenCL kernels that execute on the GPU via these libraries. No need for proprietary driver blobs running on the host machine.
I hope we can get to a point where trying to sell a GPU that requires a proprietary driver running in the host OS is as viable as trying to sell a CPU that requires the same.
I think one of the primary reasons more people don't target GPUs to offload computation, is because it -- most often -- requires proprietary drivers running on the host OS, for it to work (at an acceptable speed).
Imagine if putting an AMD of nVidia card in your box was the same as adding a CPU. If you wanted to write OpenCL to execute on the GPU, thread allocation, memory management etc. for that would be part of an open source OpenCL library, that your application links to, and then you can write OpenCL kernels that execute on the GPU via these libraries. No need for proprietary driver blobs running on the host machine.
I hope we can get to a point where trying to sell a GPU that requires a proprietary driver running in the host OS is as viable as trying to sell a CPU that requires the same.