POCL 1.1 Released With Experimental SPIR/SPIR-V Support

POCL, the Portable Computing Language, that aims to be a portable and open-source OpenCL implementation that can run on CPUs as well as AMD HSA targets and more, is out with a new feature release.

POCL 1.1 brings support for the LLVM Clang 5.0 and 6.0 branches, but besides that are some exciting updates for this OpenCL implementation. First up, there is initial support for SPIR and SPIR-V intermediate representation support. This is helpful for newer OpenCL code-bases with the optional SPIR-V support but could also prove useful for the attempts at getting Vulkan running on the CPU as a soft of LLVMpipe for Vulkan with SPIR-V now being the common IR. It will be interesting to see if anyone takes that up since the Kazan CPU-based Vulkan implementation has basically stalled. Albeit SPIR-V support is just one part of the equation to get going.

POCL 1.1 also features improvements around the kernel compilation speed.

More details on POCL 1.1 are available from PortableCL.org.