> But it's interesting to consider why HIP doesn't support compiling to OpenCL.

It's not HIP that will support compiling _to_ OpenCL, but rather the compiler toolchain will have an OpenCL compiler that will compile down to ISA [1], promised to be released for the ROCm stack in the coming weeks [2].

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d... [2] https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/30