AMD announces new OpenCL programming tools

Actual announcement: <a href="http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&#38;p=irol-newsArticle_pf&#38;id=1572937" rel="nofollow">http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&#38;p=irol-newsArtic...</a><p>Link to the new debugger: <a href="http://developer.amd.com/tools/gDEBugger/Pages/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://developer.amd.com/tools/gDEBugger/Pages/default.aspx</a>

<i>Task Manager API: A framework to manage scheduling kernels across devices</i><p>This makes me wonder... how useful is the GPU for kernel development?

AMD's GPU support for Linux has always been spotty. How much does this depend on their hardware drivers?

Wait, wasn't Microsoft's OpenCL alternative DirectCompute?