Where The Metal API Could Be Headed

For those who (like me) were curious to know more about the reasoning beind the new Metal API Apple announced at WWDC 2014, Ryan Smith at AnandTech describes why the graphics industry wants to strip away the higher layers like OpenGL and DirectX for better performance. He also speculates about use beyond graphics:

The low-level nature of Metal on the other hand means that it’s a good (or at least better) fit for GPU computing, as the lack of abstraction for graphics makes it more capable of handling the workflows and data types of compute tasks. This is one area in particular where the Metal shader language being based on a subset of C++11 is a benefit to Apple, as it provides a solid foundation for writing compute kernels.