Intel Graphics Compiler Removes Support For Ice Lake & Older

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Graphics Compiler Removes Support For Ice Lake & Older

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by the Intel Compute Runtime for Level Zero and OpenCL GPU compute support as well as being depended upon by the Windows 3D driver stack has now removed platform support up to and including Ice Lake...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGC-Drops-Ice-Lake

[zboszor]

That's not news. Intel Compute Runtime 24.39 did it already and it still goes with the IGC 1.0.x series.

[pioto]

Still no LLVM version upgrade, so the IGC and the NEO driver are excluded from Debian Trixie which deprecated LLVM 14. Maybe that's actually better to work with upstream packages for compute (NEO, ipex, pytorch xpu upstream). Tying them to two year release cadence of Debian does not really work.

[zboszor]

Still no LLVM version upgrade, so the IGC and the NEO driver are excluded from Debian Trixie which deprecated LLVM 14. Maybe that's actually better to work with upstream packages for compute (NEO, ipex, pytorch xpu upstream). Tying them to two year release cadence of Debian does not really work.

IGC works with LLVM 15, though. That's what I've been using and I'm still keeping it alive in https://github.com/zboszor/meta-clang-revival for Yocto.

FWIW, IGC is not a standalone compiler, it's internal to the Intel Compute Runtime, a.k.a. the Intel OpenCL driver. Everything that supports Intel iGPU acceleration (regardless if being a direct OpenCL API user or SYCL) eventually goes through their OpenCL driver. So, if the system doesn't support LLVM 14 or 15, Intel iGPUs which are dubbed legacy now with IGC 2.x or ICR 24.39 won't be supported anymore. Rusticl will need to catch up soon. Obi-Wan I mean karolherbst, you are our only hope!

[Developer12]

Considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to use LLVM in a graphics stack, I guess it's not very surprising to see intel wanting to minimize their support burden. AMD and others went to LLVM because they thought it meant they could get easy instant OpenCL, but it's both unsuitable for GPUs and a packaging nightmare. Hopefully OpenCL through rusticl makes all of this obsolete.