Intel ISPC 1.18 Compiler Brings "Significantly Improved" Xe Graphics Performance

Ahead of Intel's Vision event next week, open-source Intel engineers have released ISPC 1.18 as the newest update to their SPMD Program Compiler.

ISPC 1.18 is the newest release of Intel's Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C language variant for single program, multiple data programming. This C-based SPMD language started off to exploit the SIMD potential of their Intel CPUs from SSE to AVX and more recently has been looking to maximize the performance potential running on Intel Xe Graphics hardware.

Last night's ISPC 1.18 release has continued performance improvements for Xe targets - being "significantly improved" thanks to various ISPC and Vector back-0end optimizations. ISPC 1.18 also has a fix around multi-target compilation, various fixes for the (unofficial) FreeBSD support, a few new APIs, and other random fixes. ISPC 1.18 is built atop LLVM 13.0.1. ISPC 1.18 also now has complete standard library support for the Float16 type.

Source and binary downloads for various platforms and the complete change-logs for the Intel ISPC 1.18 compiler release can be found via GitHub.