Does OpenCL still matter? I ask this totally from ignorance; I've heard people tell me that openCL is too slow/low level/has an obsolete model for many years but as a non-user (my work is in different domains) I can't tell if these folks are impartial or have an axe to grind.
I have a hard time seeing a meaningful future for opencl.
Apple (the original creator of opencl) has deprecated it on their platforms in favor of metal.
I think Intel has implementations, but IMO you are better off with ISPC if you are targeting a CPU.
I have a hard time keeping up with AMD's overall direction, but the latest ROCm stuff seems to focus on an implementation of CUDA AFAICT.
Nvidia apparently has no intention of focusing on opencl.
Support for opencl 2.0+ is poor. Some vendors have support, but most are partial or language only (mostly meaning c++ for compute shaders, but not the other features). IIRC, even AMDs ROCm opencl is not 2.0.
And then there are all the fpga/accelerator vendors. I don't have much experience with opencl on these, but I expect they will also move away from opencl - I'm interested to see what Xilinx does with Everest, since it will supposedly be easier to develop for than traditional FPGAs.
Vulkan compute or implementations of cuda from other vendors seem much more promising. OpenCL tried for a "one standard fits all compute," but I don't think it has worked out that well. It leads to a "write once for all platforms, optimize separately for each platform" at which point it's better to just have different standards specialized for the target. For a long time code written for one compiler wouldn't even compile with an implementation from another vendor.
Khronos, the standards body behind Vulkan/OpenCL/OpenGL, is not aiming to replace OpenCL with Vulkan Compute. But it is on the other hand introducing a CUDA-like standard, that is called SYCL that could be implemented ontop of OpenCL.
