Running OpenCL on hardware from mixed vendors

Question

I\'ve been playing with the ATI OpenCL implementation in their Stream 2.0 beta. The OpenCL in the current beta only uses the CPU for now, the next version is supposed to support

Answer 1

Ultimately, OpenCL will work the same way as OpenGL. That is, users will install the current drivers from their hardware vendors (ATI, NVIDIA, Intel). You as the developer will simply link against an OpenCL library when building your applications. When users run your application, the application will redirect to the appropriate vendor specific libraries provided by the drivers.

This is the way it will work, but it does not yet work in this way.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you will still probably have to provide vendor specific code paths as code running on the CPU using OpenCL will probably use different optimized kernel parameters than code running on the GPU. The same is probably true for differences between GPU vendors.