Intel oneAPI's Embree 4.1 Brings Its Ray-Tracing Library To 64-bit ARM

One of the fascinating elements of Intel's oneAPI software effort is how open they have been not to just supporting GPUs from multiple vendors or AMD CPUs too, but cross-CPU architecture support. Many Intel oneAPI components end up working on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and even IBM POWER. The latest Intel software package seeing 64-bit ARM Linux support is their Embree ray-tracing kernels.

Embree is Intel's high performance ray-tracing library supporting both CPUs and GPUs and working across operating systems. Embree is part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit.

It was earlier this year with Embree 4.0 where they introduced Arc Graphics support via SYCL. With Embree 4.0.1 they extended their GPU coverage to include the Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series. Now with yesterday's release of Embree 4.1 there is support for the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series.

On the CPU side, the main change of Embree 4.1 is now supporting 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) on Linux. This goes along with many other Intel oneAPI software components working on AArch64 too. Particularly with Intel now having discrete graphics offerings that can work on AArch64 servers (well, once the new Xe kernel graphics driver is ready to serve in place of i915 DRM) it's a combination that Intel software engineers aren't ignoring.

This modest Embree 4.1 update can be downloaded from GitHub including the macOS, Windows, and Linux reference binaries for this ray-tracing software.