Intel ISPC Compiler Lands GPU Code Generation Support

Intel's open-source ISPC (the Intel SPMD Program Compiler) now has preliminary support for code generation targeting their GPUs.

The Intel SPMD Program Compiler that is focused on C programming with extensions around single program, multiple data programming concepts for leveraging SSE and AVX is now seeing initial support for exploiting the potential of Intel graphics processors.

ISPC has long worked well for exploiting the potential of AVX/AVX2 and AVX-512 as well as SSE4 while now this SPMD program compiler can begin targeting Intel Gen/Xe Graphics.

The ISPC support relies upon Intel's oneAPI Level Zero for managing devices and other orchestration.

With this "alpha" support initially only Intel Gen9 era graphics are supported while newer Gen11/Gen12 (Xe) graphics are expected soon along with other improvements.

There are a variety of known limitations like lacking recursion support, function pointers, global atomics, double precision math functions, and other features. But over the months ahead we should see this ISPC compiler support better handle Intel GPUs.

More details on this experimental support via ISPC on GitHub.