By Sylvie Barak
Wednesday, 1 July 2009, 15:47

THE OLD COBBLERS that Nvidia is busily chipping away trying to adapt its Cuda technology to AMD's GPUs has emerged yet again, seemingly over some confusing comments made by the Green Goblin's chief scientist, Bill Dally. In a roundtable discussion, Ben Hardwidge of Techradar asked Dally about Cuda, mentioning that it currently works only on Nvidia GPUs.

"If you're a developer who wants to reach as wide an audience as possible, wouldn't it be better just to go with OpenCL?" probed Hardwidge, only to be told "In the future you'll be able to run C with CUDA extensions on a broader range of platforms." Dally went on to cryptically add "I'm familiar with some projects that are underway to enable CUDA on other platforms." He didn't elaborate further.

Surprised by this, the INQ decided to ask Nvidia outright whether it was indeed fiddling about with Cuda to allow developers to use it on both NV and AMD GPUs, making money off AMD's products. The answer, when it finally arrived after hours of waiting, was evasive. Nvidia PR told us Dally had probably been referring to something else entirely, like a Linux-based tool designed to compile the CUDA programming model to a CPU architecture, or running C on anything from PCs, to handhelds, to servers and Playstations.

"So, nothing to do with AMD GPUs then?" *Cough, ehem, cough* "Er, we'll get back to you, but don't think so" - or something to that effect - came Nvidia's response. When that response half heartedly did come back to us, it stutteringly read "he [Dally] was giving a hypothetical....technology wise it could....both companies would have to do some work..." Aha. A hypothetical, eh? Hypothetically we could all be living on the moon by 2020 too.