Intel oneAPI 1.0 Officially Released

After announcing oneAPI at the end of 2018 and then going into beta last year, oneAPI 1.0 is now official for this open-source, standards-based unified programming model designed to support Intel's range of hardware from CPUs to GPUs to other accelerators like FPGAs. Intel's oneAPI initiative has been one of several exciting software efforts led by the company in recent years while continuing to serve as one of the world's largest contributors to open-source software.

At the center of oneAPI is Intel's Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) as the language built atop C++ and Khronos SYCL standards. Besides their LLVM/Clang-based DPC++ compiler toolchain also encompassing oneAPI are their many libraries from deep learning with oneDNN to oneMKL as their math kernel library to oneDAL for analytics, oneTBB for threading, and oneVPL for video processing, among other components. As part of the oneAPI rendering toolkit is also the likes of OSPray, Open Image Denoise, Open Volume Kernel Library, and other open-source software components. There is also the oneAPI Level Zero API as their low-level hardware abstraction interface, which reached 1.0 last month.

With today's 1.0 milestone, it's about the 1.0 specification that they feel is ready to deliver on providing a common developer experience across accelerator architectures. The oneAPI 1.0 specification is available from spec.oneapi.com. The community can engage with oneAPI development via GitHub.

While oneAPI is most often talked about for now in the context of Intel hardware given their product portfolio, there has already been work on bringing oneAPI/DPC++ to NVIDIA GPUs as third-party work being pursued by Codeplay in cooperation with Intel. In terms of CPU-based execution, Intel's oneAPI software libraries have been running fine on AMD CPUs (and to great performance in many instances!) as well as even seeing work to support POWER and ARM architectures with their software libraries.

On the software side at Phoronix we have already been benchmarking oneAPI components including the likes of oneDNN, Open Image Denoise, OpenVKL, OSPray, and more. I am continually tracking the various Intel open-source software implementations and adding new coverage as interesting tests materialize. I will also be working on more oneAPI Level Zero / GPU tests once getting my hands on Tigerlake / Xe hardware for greater performance testing/analysis. It will be very interesting to watch the oneAPI scene develop as we move into 2021.