If ever there was a sign a particular area of development was going mainstream, it is the entry of Microsoft into the space. Rik Myslewksi at The Register has a somewhat breathless write up of Microsoft’s answers to OpenCL and CUDA, C++ AMP.
Microsoft principal native-languages architect Herb Sutter unveiled the technology Wednesday morning at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit. Initially, C++ AMP will help devs take advantage of general purpose GPU computing (GPGPU), but in the future, Microsoft will extend the technology to multi-core architectures and beyond.
Those future plans include opening up the specification, if not the implementation of C++ AMP. Sutter also explains the reasons for choosing C++ over C although I expect that have more to do with Microsoft’s proprietary tooling investments in the form of Visual C++. Given both of those bits, I don’t really expect to see this particular approach employed aware outside of Windows. The siloing of approaches in this area is more tragic in my mind than existing application development since building usable and effective parallel programming techniques and tools is a vastly greater challenge.
Microsoft juices C++ for massively parallel computing, The Register
