Beignet 1.1 Released With Skylake, SPIR Support, Other New OpenCL Features

Beignet, the project for providing open-source OpenCL support on Intel Iris/HD Graphics hardware, has released a new version of their Intel OpenCL implementation for Linux systems.

Yang Rong, one of the Intel China team responsible for maintaining Beignet, released Beignet 1.1 followed by bumping the Git master code to Beignet v1.2.

In the release announcement he noted some of the big changes, "Beignet got Khronos OpenCL 1.2 conformance certification on [Broadwell]. Meanwhile, Beignet supports more and more platforms, include 3rd to 6th Generation Intel Core Processors and some Intel Atom Processors. This release also add some new features, such as cl_intel_subgroups and cl_khr_spir extensions and half data type support. This release continue to improve the quality and performance, some OpenCV 3.0 benchmarks has 3x ~ 4x performance gain."

Beignet 1.1 officially supports Intel Core "Skylake" processors being announced next week, Intel Atom "Braswell" SoCs, support for the cl_khr_spir extension to build and run from a SPIR binary (not to be confused with SPIR-V), and other changes.

Sadly, the OpenCL 2.0 support for Beignet appears somewhat stalled. The latest commits to Beignet's OpenCL20 branch were back in March of this year... At least Beignet has full OpenCL 1.2 support while the Gallium3D OpenCL is still limited to OpenCL 1.1.