Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 Release 3 was quietly made available earlier this month and it offers some interesting Linux changes.

Aside from offering support for 7th Generation Core "Kaby Lake" processors and Windows 10 Anniversary support, there are a number of interesting Linux changes. Linux work in this release includes Yocto support, OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V support, hardware counters support on Linux, and latency analysis support for Skylake/KabyLake CPUs.

The OpenCL 2.1 support is experimental CPU-only runtime support for OpenCL 2.1 workloads. The SPIR-V generation support is via Intel Code Builder for OpenCL.

While it's nice that Intel provides OpenCL 2.1 / SPIR-V support for Linux, unfortunately this OpenCL software is closed-source. The Beignet project from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has yet to support OpenCL 2.0 even nor SPIR-V.

More details on this Intel OpenCL SDK 2016 R3 release via software.intel.com.