I haven't yet given it a spin but it won't be fair to call it just syntactic sugar. The value it provides, besides a little easier to write syntax is abstractin

I haven't yet given it a spin but it won't be fair to call it just syntactic sugar. The value it provides, besides a little easier to write syntax is abstracting kernel level code. You don't need to specify block/grid size, move memories around CPU/GPU but I doubt if it can match the performance of hand-written OpenCL/CUDA kernels when it becomes to bleeding-edge Imaging performance.