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I wonder why Intel didn't take the OpenCL route farther. Even plain-vanilla, and certainly with some vendor extensions, it could have made it quite easy for programmers to manage to get the hardware to play nicely.

Also, on an unrelated note: IIANM I believe Intel now sorta-kinda offers the ability to set some cache aside to be close to fully programmable. But I forgot exactly what the mechanism for that is called.

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You mean for CPUs? Check out ISPC, it's essentially a lightweight data-parallel C for CPUs (that has been ported to Intel GPUs too!), and I think also works fine on even some non-x86 architectures. I'm not sure if there's any mature CPU OpenCL runtimes.

Intel also still supports OpenCL as a first-class target on their GPUs, which is more than I can say for Nvidia or AMD.

OpenCL was a decent effort, but without Nvidia on board it was IMO too little too late - by the time that became a thing, NVDA already was entrenched in the accelerator compute software space. Even worse when Intel/AMD didn't offer a good story to also target CPU vector units with it - that would have created a strong enough ecosystem to target.

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