Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Now Exposes Cooperative Matrix Support

Merged on Friday for Mesa 24.0-devel in Q1 is support for the VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix extension with Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver.

VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix is the extension introduced this summer with Vulkan 1.3.255 and is intended to help accelerate machine learning workloads with Vulkan. The Vulkan cooperative matrix support and adjoining SPIR-V work is intended for Vulkan compute with machine learning workloads and similar to the cooperative matrix support in OpenCL.

The Radeon Vulkan Mesa driver has already supported this extension as of Mesa 23.3 while now for Mesa 24.0 there is Intel support for both their integrated and discrete graphics. The VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix support on the Intel hardware side goes back to the common Intel Gen9 (Skylake era) graphics and newer.

"Gfx12.5 (DG2) will use DPAS instructions to accelerate the implementation. Earlier platforms will use equivalent discrete instructions (basically subgroup operations). Gfx12 (Tigerlake) will use DP4A for 8-bit integer matrix multiplication. Older platforms, which lack DP4A, will use a suboptimal instruction sequence. There is plenty of room for improvement here."

More details on this Intel Vulkan cooperative matrix support via this Mesa commit.