Vulkan 1.2.190 Released With SPIR-V Integer Dot Product Support

Vulkan 1.2.190 resolves several issues with the specification, but most exciting with this routine Vulkan API update is the introduction of two new extensions.

The extensions introduced with Vulkan 1.2.190 are VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product and VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart.

As implied by the name, the VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product extension is about integer dot product support for Vulkan. In particular, adding support for the integer dot product SPIR-V instructions defined in SPV_KHR_integer_dot_product. SPV_KHR_integer_dot_product allows for dot product operations on integer vectors with optional accumulation. The SPIR-V support allows for integer dot product support for all input vector types but also support for 4-component vectors of 8-bit integers and support there for being able to pack into 32-bit integers for devices/GPUs lacking native Int8 support.

The integer dot product support was worked on by stakeholders from AMD, Arm, Google, Samsung, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and others. This support can be useful for Vulkan-accelerated neural networks and other purposes.

VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart is the other new extension of Vulkan 1.2.190. VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart was worked on by Google engineers to allow for list primitives to use the primitive restart index value. In turn, VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart is about allowing more efficient OpenGL-on-Vulkan by avoiding emulation that incurs data copies. So VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart should be useful for the various projects out there like Zink working to implementing the OpenGL graphics API atop Vulkan.

The list of Vulkan 1.2.190 changes in full can be found via GitHub.