ATI/AMD's Open-Source Plans

[R3MF]

Will AMD's Compute Abstraction Layer be competitive with Nvidia's CUDA from a usability point of view?

CTM never cut the mustard, it was too close to the metal and thus too difficult for mainstream adoption, but now i hear mention of this mysterious thing called CAL. Anyone got a decent link to some understandable info?

I would like to see AMD do well with their open-source policy, but they seem to be well behind Nvidia on the GP-GPU front:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_showcase.html

GP-GPU is starting to matter; I want to be able to accelerate Dirac encoded video using my GPU which is something Nvidia/CUDA can do, but will this ever happen for AMD/CAL?

It's not that it isn't possible for AMD/CAL to do these things, i'm sure it is, but CUDA has got its head start by being easy to use and I have yet to see anything from AMD that suggests their CAL is a competitor to CUDA in this matter..............

[Svartalf]

I want to stress that "Crossfire Graphics" itself is not on the open source roadmap.

Shame. Helping us with Crossfire would just give people more incentives to go with AMD's stuff. Having that in the closed driver just makes you the same as NVidia in that regard- and we're trying to have a superlative out of the box experience and get away from most people needing a closed driver for things like this. Crossfire would be one of those things that'd help go a long way towards that.

But, I suspect that AMD's viewing it like TIMMO...sigh...