OpenCL Programming Guide

Preface

Industry pundits love drama. New products don’t build on the status quo to make things better. They “revolutionize” or, better yet, define a “new paradigm.” And, of course, given the way technology evolves, the results rarely are as dramatic as the pundits make it seem.

Over the past decade, however, something revolutionary has happened. The drama is real. CPUs with multiple cores have made parallel hardware ubiquitous. GPUs are no longer just specialized graphics processors; they are heavyweight compute engines. And their combination, the so-called heterogeneous platform, truly is redefining the standard building blocks of computing.

We appear to be midway through a revolution in computing on a par with that seen with the birth of the ...