Intel Open-Source Stack Enables oneAPI Level Zero For Rocket Lake, Alder Lake S

A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel's engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support.

Rocket Lake and forthcoming Alder Lake S processors with Xe Graphics should now have working Level Zero support with Intel Compute Runtime 21.20.19883. Enabling Rocket Lake and Alder Lake S Level Zero support is the main highlight of today's Compute-Runtime update plus the cl_intel_sharing_format_query extension is also now enabled.

Level Zero is Intel's low-level, direct-to-metal interfaces for offload accelerators such as their graphics hardware. oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 was firmed up last year while the v1.1 revision has been worked out since and Level Zero continues advancing with the overall exciting state of Intel's oneAPI software efforts.

Aside from this late Level Zero enabling for Rocket Lake, the rest of the Gen12 Xe Graphics of Rocket Lake processors has been settled for a while with the rest of Intel's open-source Linux driver stack. In recent months the developers involved have been doing much work on Alder Lake support that is hitting the kernel and related components now. The Alder Lake Linux support should all be squared away in time for the first of these hybrid architecture processors reaching the market later this calendar year.

Intel's Compute Runtime provides Level Zero 1.1 support back through Skylake Gen9 graphics plus OpenCL 3.0 support. While the OpenCL support on this open-source Linux driver stack is rated "production" ready, the Level Zero support from Gen9 through Gen12 remains in a "pre-release" form.

This updated Intel Compute Runtime can be downloaded from GitHub either in source form or Ubuntu/Debian binaries.