Intel Releases New OpenCL Implementation for GNU/Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has released its first version of Beignet, an open-source OpenCL run-time and LLVM back-end for Linux that uses LLVM/Clang and is compatible with Ivy Bridge processors. Right now there's partial support for OpenCL 1.0 and 1.1 along with other basic functionality." This is not using Gallium 3D, and at least David Arlie thinks it should not be an fd.o project because it duplicates functionality already present in Mesa.

Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language

[Plombo]

Clover does not depend on X11 or OpenGL. It will be able to run without a graphics card if LLVMpipe has support for it; I don't remember if it does. So yes, it can do all of those things. On the other hand, Beignet currently requires an Ivy Bridge CPU and graphics hardware.

Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language

[TheRaven64]

OpenCL is a fairly typical industry standard. All of the major industry players wanted to ensure that it could be compiled to their GPUs, so it ended up with an abstract model that doesn't really match any GPU and a load of features that exist because one GPU has a very fast path for executing them, but none of the others do. Come to an LLVM Dev Meeting some time and you'll hear about a hundred compiler developers complaining about it. When you have some MIMD, some SIMD, and some SIMT architectures all trying to run the same code, all implementing a different set of ALU ops, writing code with vaguely predictable performance is really hard, and trying to run code written with one target in mind on a different one with reasonable performance is very hard.