OpenCL 3.0.7 Released With New Extensions

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenCL 3.0.7 Released With New Extensions

The Khronos Group used the International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL 2021) to release OpenCL 3.0.7 as the latest OpenCL 3 revision that brings with it some new extensions...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenCL-3.0.7-Released

[coder]

Good stuff. I wonder who are the parties primarily responsible for these extensions. My guess is Intel. The C++ extensions point to SYCL/DPC++ and the integer dot-product points to deep learning, where I know OpenVINO supports OpenCL.

[coder]

I'm even starting to consider upgrading to a Rocket Lake CPU, just to dabble with its Xe iGPU.

[tildearrow]

Another OpenCL version? :<

[coder]

Another OpenCL version? :<

Tro-lol-lol-lol!
; )

Based on their roadmap, you'll have plenty more opportunities to get in these jabs.

[kieffer]

Another OpenCL version? :<

I would say: just a few additional extensions. But some of them are appealing.

[tildearrow]

I would say: just a few additional extensions. But some of them are appealing.

What's more appealing?

- the extensions
- Vulkan

Not saying OpenCL is bad though...

[coder]

What's more appealing?

- the extensions
- Vulkan

Depends on what you're doing. Vulkan isn't supported on FPGAs, for one thing. More importantly, I believe it lacks OpenCL's accuracy guarantees (I expect Vulkan-compute differs, in that regard).

As for the extensions, one of them is:

"cl_khr_vk_sharing for associating an OpenCL context with a Vulkan physical device"

...which should tell you there are people using Vulkan who still want/need OpenCL.

[mdedetrich]

What's more appealing?

- the extensions
- Vulkan

Not saying OpenCL is bad though...

Why do people keep on bringing up Vulkan as a replacement for OpenCL, they have completely different design goals. OpenCL is for general compute on GPU's, Vulkan is for rendering. Yes there is overlap, but you are not going to code your game engine in OpenCL and you are not going to be doing scientific math HPC calculations in Vulkan.

[tildearrow]

Why do people keep on bringing up Vulkan as a replacement for OpenCL, they have completely different design goals. OpenCL is for general compute on GPU's, Vulkan is for rendering. Yes there is overlap, but you are not going to code your game engine in OpenCL and you are not going to be doing scientific math HPC calculations in Vulkan.

It is harder to code a game engine in OpenCL (as you don't have access to the geometry hardware and stuff), but it is easier to code a compute application on Vulkan.

Vulkan driver installation is easy; for OpenCL it is a mess.
Sometimes compute is important, even for small applications (office suites).

See waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan for a big example.