I don't know if it's accurate to say this is a competitor to OpenCL. We don't have full details, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was <i>implemented using OpenCL</i>. OpenCL is relatively low-level. It's quite un-friendly for developers to use directly. It's much more reasonable for compilers to generate it, or for libraries to build abstractions on top of it.<p>My dissertation work did a similar with with OpenMP-like syntax and semantics built on top of the Cell's native API: <a href="http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/cellgen/" rel="nofollow">http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/cellgen/</a> (And, actually, my compiler generated code for a library that was a thin wrapper on top of the Cell's native API itself - it's so low-level that it was easier to have another layer of abstraction between my generated code and it.)
"another option with the full weight of Microsoft behind it"<p>Well, thank goodness for that. There was me thinking it might be a temporary project to grab some developer mindshare to be dumped in a couple of years.
Just when I thought Microsoft had finally seen the virtue of contributing to an existing standard instead of being different just for the sake of being different. Surely the software industry as a whole would be better off if Microsoft instead threw its weight into fixing whatever is wrong with OpenCL.