Intel Releases New OpenCL Implementation for GNU/Linux 60
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.
Duplicated effort (Score:5, Interesting)
Dave Airlie is right. There is no good reason for Intel to duplicate all of the work already done on Clover. Of course, Intel hasn't used Gallium for anything before, but their GL drivers have been around since before Gallium drivers became the standard and their video decoding implementation came before there were Gallium state trackers for video decoding.
This, however, just seems like mismanagement to me. Maybe it has to do with this being developed by Intel OTC China instead of Intel OSTC Portland where Intel's Mesa developers are employed, but we now have two frontends that do the same thing.
From the readme [freedesktop.org] in its repository, it seems that Beignet is still far from complete. Hopefully Intel will change its mind and use Clover if it wants OpenCL working on its hardware under Linux.
Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language (Score:2, Interesting)
I have heard it said that the general purpose solutions (OpenCL and DirectCompute both) can't represent the GPU architecture in enough detail to get the same level of efficiency as using a platform-specific API such as CUDA. If you want your code to be as fast as possible, and you know you are building a system around NV hardware, then CUDA is supposedly a better target.
Of course the alternative is that NV isn't putting as much effort in making the OpenCL/DirectCompute driver interfaces as efficient as CUDA, and what I said above is just an excuse, but I can't prove either.