Intel ISPC 1.17 Compiler Released With Xe HPG, PS5 & AMD Zen Support

Intel ended out the week with a huge update to ISPC, the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler. ISPC is Intel's LLVM-based compiler focused on its C variant with extensions for single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming. Interestingly with this release is the introduction of AMD Zen 1/2/3 targeting and even the PlayStation 5 while also adding support for forthcoming Intel Arc "Alchemist" (Xe HPG) hardware.

On the CPU side Intel's ISPC 1.17 brings performance improvements for the double data type on AVX-512 targets, a new avx512skx-i32x4 target, and zen1/zen2/zen3 CPU definitions (znver1/znver2/znver3) for AMD Zen processors. There is also experimental support for ISPC to target the Sony PlayStation 5 (PS5) platform.

AMD Zen CPU definitions have made it into the Intel SPMD compiler.

New Xe targets were added of xelp-x8 and xelp-x16 for Tiger Lake and similar Xe LP hardware. The xehpg-x8 and xehpg-x16 targets were added meanwhile for Xe HPG / Arc GPUs based on DG2 / Alchemist. There is also stability and performance improvements as part of the SPMD compiler with ISPC 1.17.

Intel's ISPC 1.17 compiler release is rather big and based on LLVM 12.

The open-source Intel ISPC 1.17 release can be downloaded from GitHub with both Windows and Linux binaries available. The Linux builds depend upon OpenMP support and Intel Compute Runtime with Level Zero for GPU targeting.