No, my choice ruled out the new Mac Pro, not all Macs. I bought a 5,1 Mac Pro and put an NVIDIA card in it. If I bought a new iMac or a new MacBook Pro, CUDA apps would work there as well.
There is buried premise here that Nvidia won't get shut out. I'm sure AMD shows up for the which x86 CPU in next version bake off every time Apple has one. In that space, they aren't hitting Apple's specs and so haven't gotten a win.
@Jasonvp said it properly: CUDA is dead on the nMP, for now.
You leaving out his last sentence in that response.
"... And don't be too surprised to see Apple push similar direction down to those platforms. .... " ( where 'those platforms' was MBP , iMac ).
Nvidia lapsing on OpenCL support isn't speculative at all. They have. If they continue down that track there will be ramifications. That are indications that either Nivida is drinking their own kool-aid (" CUDA won; the GPGPU API battle is over ") or just playing dumb to incrementally juice their increasing limited scope market. Either way, it is highly sub optimal to them winning new Apple GPU bake-offs for Macs.
Perhaps NVidia is playing a "tortoise vs. hare" game where they only support OpenCL while there is an active window for an Apple design bake-off. Perhaps, but I doubt they are fooling anyone at Apple with that. It might work if AMD have fumbled their upcoming updates badly.
Apple picks vendors who deliver what they ask for. Apple is asking for OpenCL (you are smoking something crazy strong if you want to label that as speculative). Nvidia is not delivering on OpenCL right now.
Maybe in a couple years it will be dead across the while Mac line,
The big MBP/iMac design bake off is probably happening around now (or are already over for 2014 designs); not a couple of years from now. There was no bake-off window for 2013 designs as both Nvidia and AMD basically had just speed bump upgrades.
And should this upgradable nMP ever have an NVIDIA GPU replacement, even that model would regain CUDA support.
Who is speculating now? It is a custom card with apparent custom connector with support for AMD Crossfire. I'm wouldn't hold my breath on that. By all appearances so far, these cards are going to be specific to this Mac Pro iteration and vice versa. Just like other Macs with embedded GPUs.
Look, this is all future speculation. But when someone says CUDA is now dead on the Mac, but all the Mac software options I have are CUDA only, I have a hard time reconciling the two.
"dead" is more so a reference to the future momentum. What you are focusing on is more so the past inertia ( past design wins and legacy software libraries ). Legacy inertia doesn't necessarily win in Apple design bake offs. There is a clear and established track record on that. That is hardly speculative.
Apple never said they were committed to supporting CUDA. It always was the case that Apple got to pick the GPUs in the sold configurations. There used to be a limited scope where developers could just say "Screw Apple's choices, I'm going to pick my customers GPU". That 's now gone. It is Apple's call across the whole line up now. That isn't speculative at all. Mac developers who think they still calls the shots on that have gone from denial to deep denial.
Wait, I thought it was already dead?
This isn't particularly about "dead" right now when talking about future plans of software developers. It is about where things are going. I fully understand developers who might say "we didn't do any planning for OpenCL 2-3 years ago so have nothing now on the Mac platform". They were ingoring lots of guidelines Apple was laying down, but AMD and Intel were not implementation all that well to that either. At this point though Intel and AMD have turn the corner and somewhat strangely, from a Mac perspective, Nvidia is going in the opposite direction from Apple guidelines. In that context, for developers to say they doubling down on Nvidia is either denial or just clueless.
