Intel Tiger Lake OpenCL Support On Linux Now Considered Production Ready

With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago.

The open-source Intel Compute Runtime in the past two weeks now has "production" ready OpenCL support for the forthcoming Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. That's good news with Tiger Lake laptops expected to market soon.

Up until the Intel Compute Runtime 20.29.17408 release two weeks ago, the Tiger Lake OpenCL support in the documentation was always marked as "early support" but is now promoted to "production" in matching that of prior generations of Intel graphics hardware. The Intel oneAPI Level Zero support for Tiger Lake meanwhile remains at the "early support" state.

This open-source Intel compute stack is exposing OpenCL 3.0 support for Tiger Lake right now while Broadwell through Ice Lake is at OpenCL 2.1. Intel engineers have said that OpenCL 3.0 support will come to prior generations of hardware once the OpenCL 3.0 specification is finalized. While under the provisional specification, OpenCL 3.0 so far was just turned on for next-generation Tiger Lake / Gen12 even though OpenCL 2.x hardware/drivers can implement CL 3.0. Thankfully when the CL 3.0 specification is firmed up later this year we should see punctual official OpenCL 3.0 support for those targets back to Skylake if not Broadwell too.

The support matrix for oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL can be found via the compute-runtime releases.