Talk:Compute kernel

The content of the Compute kernel page was merged into Shader#Compute kernels on 8 November 2025. For the contribution history and old versions of the merged article, please see its history.

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Contested deletion

This article should not be speedy deleted as being recently created, having no relevant page history and duplicating an existing English Wikipedia topic, because...

A Compute Kernel aka compute shaderis a very different concept to a Kernel (operating system). I have created this page to explain this concept, which is common to several languages/APIs (OpenCL, OpenGL, CUDA, C++AMP, Vulkan SPIR-V) for leveraging accelerators, relating to throughput oriented, parallel processing, as opposed to OS kernels: which are systems running on CPUs that manage other processes.

Compute kernels are broadly described as subsets of other articles but I feel that where possible, having pages for concepts maximises the potential for specific links.

It may be an idea to also create a redirect for 'compute shader' which is used almost synonymously, however this concept is slightly more general ; compute-shaders are more related to GPU hardware and graphics APIs (evolved from vertex shaders and pixel shaders), whilst compute-kernels suggest something that could run on any parallel hardware.

--Fmadd (talk) 22:31, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I removed the speedy deletion request. Despite the name, these are clearly distinct topics. —Ruud 10:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Propose merging this article into the shader article

The result of the discussion was merge as unopposed. (Remember that any editor can perform a merge without discussing it if it's uncontroversial.) FaviFake (talk) 09:08, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The shader article can be made less rendering specific and due to the historical links of compute kernels and shaders and their link to GPUs, this content can be incorporated into the shader article. Additional references can be made to general-purpose computing on graphics processing units. Portadapter (talk) 12:36, 28 July 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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