Microsoft C++ AMP is now 'Open'
A significant announcement was made by Microsoft last week regarding C++ AMP. The technology has now been made an Open Specification. This was announced at the GoingNative 2012 event. This means any C++ compiler developer can now come up with an implementation of these specifications and support the C++ AMP features on a wide array of heterogeneous hardware.
For those new to C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism(AMP), it is a native progamming model that enables C++ code to be accelerated on data parallel hardware such as GPUs. The data parallel hardware is referred to as accelerator. Just as with CUDA, using C++ AMP, one can parallelize the data intensive portions of a program on the accelerator and explicitly control to data communication between the CPU and accelerator.
Microsoft C++ AMP is part of Visual Studio 2011 release. C++ AMP Open specification can be found here.