[msandford]

MATLAB will recognize if you've got FFTW or ATLAS or other highly tuned numerical libraries installed. And MATLAB will then use them whenever possible.

If Intel does a good enough job of providing a collection of compute kernels and the surrounding CPU libraries to make using them roughly as "easy" as CUDA then a lot of people will pick that up.

I don't have any hard numbers but I would suspect that there are a great many more people who use MATLAB on a CPU than those who do MATLAB->HDL. So what I'm speculating about is that Intel might support those folks who use MATLAB on a CPU for more general purpose things.

Does that make more sense?