[joeld42]

CUDA sounds like the kind of "heterogeneous" model the author is suggesting. Unfortunately it has it's own set of problems.

I'm not really sure what kind of API the author wants. Sure, it's annoying that data in GPU-land and CPU-land are difficult to get to work together. But that's not the API's fault, it's because they are physically very far removed from each other. They don't share memory (and if they did you'd still have to lock and manage it). You could make an API that made them seem more transparent to the programmer, but then you're back to the GL 1.0 mess where you have zero control and the driver does dumb things at random times because it doesn't know anything about the program that is executing.

[vvanders]

If you're on mobile GPU chipsets the latter is actually more common(CPU/GPU being in the same memory space).

That said it doesn't really change a whole lot, each platform has it's own unique performance characteristics and I don't think you'll ever correctly represent that at the API level. APIs tend to move much slower than the hardware platforms that power them.