NVIDIA responds to Larrabee claims

DailyTech received a mail from NVIDIA regarding some of the claims Intel made about the Larrabee GPU's capability to be programmed with C or C++. Intel said the advantage of Larrabee is that programmers don't need to learn a new language like CUDA as they can simply program in C or C++ but NVIDIA says this is misinformation as CUDA is just our brand name for their C-compiler:

CUDA is a C-language compiler that is based on the PathScale C compiler. This open source compiler was originally developed for the x86 architecture. The NVIDIA computing architecture was specifically designed to support the C language - like any other processor architecture. Competitive comments that the GPU is only partially programmable are incorrect - all the processors in the NVIDIA GPU are programmable in the C language.

NVIDIA's approach to parallel computing has already proven to scale from 8 to 240 GPU cores. Also, NVIDIA is just about to release a multi-core CPU version of the CUDA compiler. This allows the developer to write an application once and run across multiple platforms. Larrabee's development environment is proprietary to Intel and, at least disclosed in marketing materials to date, is different than a multi-core CPU software environment.