AMD's close-to-the-metal was the blueprint for Vulkan, or at leat the majorest contributor (ed: oops, im thinking of AMD Mantle, a little bit latter & also extr

AMD's close-to-the-metal was the blueprint for Vulkan, or at leat the majorest contributor (ed: oops, im thinking of AMD Mantle, a little bit latter & also extremely super low level). It won. It's ideas power almost all GPU technology today. Vulkans not relatively easy to do from scratch, but it is cross platform, and again, most folks dont need to write Vulkan. They're using ML frameworks that abstract that away. Vulkan will enable use of countless great extensions & capabilities that tools like SYCL wont be smart enough to use. Maybe the SPIR-V can be optimized by the drivers well, but the code SYCL spits out, i'd wager, will be world's less than what we do if we try. This is what CUDA does: it allows bad/cheap SYCL like code, but most folks use NV's vast ultra-complete libraries that are far far far better written in much lower level code & tweaked for every last oz of performance. CUDA is basically a scripting language + close to the metal library. SYCL might eventually be able to become similar, but only if we do the hard work of making really good Vulkan libraries. Otherwise it'll be pretty much trash. There's a lot of argumemts in favor of being bad, of not going for thr good stuff. But end of the day, we just should do the right thing. Everyone other than NV should make a real start, should make a bid for their & the survival of everyone else. Vulkan is the only real bid i see.