Would you like to run CUDA-kernels on the OpenCL framework? Or Python or Rust? SPIRV is the answer! Where source-to-source translations had several limitations, SPIRV 1.1 even supports higher level languages like C++.

SPIRV is the strength of OpenCL and it will only get bigger.

Currently Intel drivers best supports SPIRV, making it the first target for the new SPIRV-frontends. It is unknown which vendor will be next – probably one which (almost) has OpenCL 2.0 drivers already, such as AMD, ARM, Qualcomm or even NVidia.

How interesting is SPIRV really?

So if SPIRV is really that important a reason to choose for OpenCL, I thought of framing it towards CUDA-devs on twitter in a special way:

Should CUDA 9 support SPIRV?

So that’s a big yes for SPIRV-support on CUDA. And why not? Don’t we want to program in our own language and not be forced to use C or C++? SPIRV makes it possible to quickly add support in any language out there without official support of the vendor. Let wrappers handle the differences per vendor and let SPIRV be the shared language for GPU-kernels. Where do we need OpenCL or CUDA for, if the real work is defined by SPIRV?

What do you think? Leave your comment below how you see the future of GPGPU with SPIRV in town. Is 2017 the year of SPIRV?

And if you worked on a SPIRV-frontend, get in touch to continue your project on https://github.com/spirv. Yes, it’s empty right now, but you don’t know what’s hidden.