Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Clang Code Begins Landing For OpenMP Offloading To SPIR-V For GPU Execution

Intel software engineers have been working on allowing OpenMP offloading to their Intel GPUs by way of targeting generic SPIR-V, the common intermediate representation used across Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers. The initial patches to that work have now landed in upstream LLVM/Clang 20 for OpenMP offloading to SPIR-V...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Clang-OpenMP-To-SPIR-V

[Eirikr1848]

Does it seem as if these will work with existing generation 9 and 9.5 GPUs?

[edxposed]

If it is eventually possible to compile llvm-libc to SPIR-V, it may be possible to see the day when it is possible to compile any C/C++ program into a executable that can be executed by CPU, GPU, or even NPU.

[sarnex]

Never did I think the day would come where my name would be mentioned in a Phoronix article lol

There is still a lot of work to be done before this is actually useable though, it should be relatively general but there will need to be a runtime plugin that knows how to talk with the GPU runtime (Level Zero in Intel's case), so that would need to be there for other vendors even if the SPIR-V device code generation works. NVIDIA and AMD plugins already exist, but they don't work with SPIR-V today.

Does it seem as if these will work with existing generation 9 and 9.5 GPUs?

Speaking unofficially, my understanding is that Gen9 is no longer supported in the GPU driver, but in theory assuming you have a working Gen9 compute setup using a driver where it was supported then yes as SPIR-V is one of the supported inputs to the compute pipeline already and SPIR-V is already used in Intel's DPCPP compiler which has a closed-source implementation of SPIR-V offloading for OpenMP, and an open source implementation for SYCL.