First of all OpenIL is important for new hardware research & development, current proprietary ILs, like AMD-IL, NV-PTX are unusable, too fat.
Industry future will be more open, that’s why standards like OpenCL is so important!
Being involved in reconfigurable computing R&D I’m developing OpenIL, very lightweight minimalistic design, just few instruction classes, see following examples:
- conditionals, example JIF r0,r1; jump to r1 addr if r0 is true;
- data transfers, example LD r0,g.r1; load r0 from global memory;
- nd-range, example ndr.lid r0; load r0 local thread id;
- sync, example barrier; sync all threads in a group;
- alu, example add r0,r1,r2; r0=r1+r2;
and some target architecture extensions classes;
Such OpenIL is based on a minimalistic reconfigurable instruction set, oriented to used in scalable, mass parallel systems on chip with thousands lightweight cores.
Sometimes it’s not so easy to explain this concept to customers, that instruction set is adoptable, optimized in a compilation time, when you compile your kernel function
OpenIL is not just specification & header files but also compilation back-end rules.
The same situation with hardware, to run OpenIL instructions we need minimalistic lightweight reconfigurable IPs library to synthesize executable cores, generated at compilation time
Such flexibility is achievable on reconfigurable devices, like FPGAs.
So, where is openness & where is a competition? OpenIL as a possible standard can help to move industry forward faster. Synthesis tools, IPs may be both proprietary & open.
Future OpenIL notes this forum & here http://twitter.com/activedaily