Intel SYCL Compiler/Runtimes Updated With Unified Shared Memory Support

Intel has released a new version of their SYCL compiler and run-time code for single-source C++ programming and allowing offloaded computations to accelerators via OpenCL.

With the new release of their SYCL stack for Linux, there is now support in place for Unified Shared Memory. Unified Shared Memory via the cl_intel_unified_shared_memory extension is Intel's alternative to OpenCL Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for allowing pointer-based programming in OpenCL. This OpenCL support in turn is leveraged for pointer-based programming with SYCL.

In addition to the Unified Shared Memory support, the SYCL update also adds image accessor support, support for unnamed lambda kernels, kernel-to-kernel blocking and non-blocking pipe functionality, and a wide range of other improvements. The SYCL stack also now has experimental support for building and linking with libc++ rather than only libstdc++ on Linux.

More details on the newest Intel SYCL stack update via GitHub.