Since when have computers meant to unstable and incorporeal, temperamental and prone to superstitions?

I sincerely hope I can buy my next computer from someone who defines their business model on things that are well defined and observable rather than the First Church of Glide.

...sorry, thought it solved all the worlds computing needs....or so some would make you belive.

Parallelism exists in several forms - the most important being MIMD and SIMD.

MIMD can be a right bastard of a wanky one-eyed panicking Scottish prime minister in a financial meltdown to deal with -- however you do get greater control over how your parallel software beast scales.

SIMD is much, much easier to deal with, it's almost serial programming. But in general it does not scale as well - unless there are some clever compiler tricks, or as I suspect, inefficiency through overcomplication becomes an issue with your MIMD program.

So where is this all going?

- Firstly SIMD will be the way to go, eventually, of parallel programming. MIMD often requires considerable effort for too little gain. As SIMD compiler optimisation improves, the performance tradeoff will become less.

- Secondly, CUDA and the like work perfectly well in this paradigm.

- Thirdly, sorry El Reg, but OpenCL isn't the standard for number crunchers - GPU number crunchers only, perhaps. Most number crunchers are computational scientists, and many of them use, or use applications that use, libraries such as BLAS and LAPACK. MatLab, PETSc, etc. etc - they all use them.

As far as I know, Nvidia are the only ones going after this third, low-hanging fruit; once they've got a full, double-precision implementation within CUBLAS, a lot of people beyond university computer science departments will be very interested.