Intel's OpenCL Beignet Project Is Gaining Ground

Beignet is the controversial project to provide OpenCL/GPGPU support for modern Intel GPUs on Linux. Since the first Beignet release in April, this open-source Intel OpenCL project has been making lots of progress.

Beignet has been controversial since it's not leveraging Mesa/Gallium3D but rather is implementing its own form of OpenCL specifically for Intel graphics cores. While there's a lot of work ahead, a lot of ground is being gained.

This summer there's been near-daily commits to Beignet by several Intel employees, namely Yang Rong, Homer Hsing, Zhigang Gong, Zou Nan hai. Frequent Phoronix readers will notice this isn't the usual Intel Mesa crew but the Beignet OpenCL work is being done by a separate team from China.

Among the recent improvements for supporting Intel OpenCL on Linux with Beignet include 64-bit float/integer support, a-sync copy support, OpenCL event support, spill/unspill functionality, double vector load/store support, and support for various OpenCL extensions.

Those looking to find out more on the latest Beignet activity, visit its FreeDesktop.org Git viewer.