AMD OpenCL APP SDK Beats Intel's Own SDK On Ivy Bridge

Here are some OpenCL benchmarks from the Intel Ivy Bridge CPU. Being compared though is AMD's APP SDK, which does support running OpenCL on x86 CPUs, to Intel's CPU-based OpenCL SDK for Linux. To some surprise, AMD's Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK when using the Ivy Bridge CPU is actually faster than the Intel OpenCL SDK on the same hardware.

Last month I wrote about Intel support for OpenCL on Linux with Ivy Bridge via Intel's closed-source OpenCL SDK. At this time, the Intel Linux graphics driver has no form of OpenCL support for the HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics processor. What is being compared now is the AMD APP SDK to Intel's OpenCL SDK while running an Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor with Ubuntu 12.04 Linux.

AMD's description of the APP (Accelered Parallel Processing) SDK comes down to "The AMD APP Software Development Kit (SDK) is a complete development platform created by AMD to allow you to quickly and easily develop applications accelerated by AMD APP technology. The SDK allows you to develop your applications in a high-level language, OpenCL (Open Computing Language)."

The latest version of the APP SDK (v2.7) has support for version 1.2 of OpenCL. However, for this testing APP SDK v2.6 was in use since this testing actually took place in early May while the results are only now in the publishing queue (v2.7 was released on 18 May). The APP SDK is closed-source and is available for Linux x86/x86_64. The APP SDK is primarily designed for use with Radeon GPUs in conjunction with the Catalyst driver, but it also supports running on x86 CPUs -- regardless of CPU vendor. The APP SDK is officially tested under Linux on openSUSE 11, Ubuntu 11.04, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Additional AMD APP SDK information is available at developer.amd.com.

The Intel OpenCL SDK 2012 for Linux was in use as the other tested OpenCL environment from the Ivy Bridge CPU. The Intel IOC SDK 2012 v1.0.2 supports OpenCL 1.1. The SDK can be used in conjunction with Intel HD Graphics HD 4000/2500 (Ivy Bridge), but that is only under Windows.

Additional Intel OpenCL SDK information is available at software.intel.com.