Before I launch into OpenCL background, I want make a prediction. I believe OpenCL will gain acceptance in much the same way nVidia CUDA has. Like CUDA, OpenCL has a freely available SDK, is based on the C language, and can be explored using low cost video hardware. OpenCL brings two other features to the table, however. These are open standard compliance and support for data-parallelism (GP-GPU) and task-parallelism (CPU) methods.
GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting
March 11, 2010