New hardware?

[TweakHead]

You're probably right. Nvidia is pushing for better gaming performance above everything else. I think this CUDA thing is also some form of publicity: they're glad that some scientists find other uses for their powerful hardware and all of that, but they're certainly not making efforts to make their day. The same goes to audio applications. But what about Open CL? I know that's some kind of standard for such things, isn't it? I remember Steve Jobs making a big deal out of it when it was introduced to Mac OS, and thinking: what happened to this revolution? How come I never saw it being used?

OpenCL 1.0 has been released with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. According to an Apple press release:[6]

Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard.

Same story we're talking about here. The technology seems to be there and we certainly have more power in our machines then ever before, but the industry has interests of its own and it's very hard to come to terms and create standards or give developers the kind of assurance you mentioned. I feel that's the case for almost everything.