Intel Releases OpenCL 1.2 Driver and Tools Update for Ivy Bridge and Haswell
by Rahul Garg on April 9, 2013 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- Haswell
- OpenCL
Intel has released an updated OpenCL driver for their 3rd Generation Core (Ivy Bridge) and 4th Generation Core (which we can safely call as Haswell) products that brings OpenCL 1.2 support on both the CPU and the GPU, moving a step up from OpenCL 1.1 in previous releases. The driver also implements better integration with both Direct3D and OpenGL. The driver is for Windows 7 and 8 only. Intel has also released an updated SDK along with the driver. The full release notes for the SDK release can be found here. Intel also supports OpenCL 1.2 on Xeon Phi.
Also of note, Intel has also recently updated their VTune Amplifier 2013 tool to add support for collecting GPU performance metrics in OpenCL applications running on Intel GPUs. Now it is possible to collect metrics such as utilization of the Execution Unit (EU) array and usage of on-chip local memory and cache of Intel HD graphics from within VTune. This will enable programmers to better understand the performance characteristics of their code on Intel GPUs, and thus will allow them to optimize their code better. According to an Intel forum post, for full GPU functionality VTune does require that the BIOS in the developer's machine support an option to collect performance metrics on the Intel GPU. This may be problematic for some developers. For example, I have a notebook with HD 4000 but was not able to enable some metrics because my notebook's BIOS does not have this option.
AMD has provided similar tools (such as CodeXL), as well as OpenCL 1.2 drivers for their GPUs for quite a while. Nvidia provides mature profiling tools for CUDA applications but their OpenCL tooling has been lackluster at best and Nvidia drivers remain at OpenCL 1.1. Overall it is good to see Intel continuosly upgrading their driver and tool support for GPU computing APIs.
Source: Intel
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Torrijos - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
What about OS X support?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
That's up to Apple.Kevin G - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
I was under the impression that Intel's integrated GPU's already had OpenCL drivers under OS X. What was lacking under OS X would be CPU drivers so that OpenCL work can be split across both architectures. I think that this is Intel's first OpenCL driver for Ivy Bridge as a CPU so there is hope that this may come to OS X.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=1710544...It's the opposite. Apple supports OpenCL on all CPUs back to the Core 2 Duo in Mountain Lion, but they don't yet support GPU OpenCL for the HD4000.
tipoo - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - link
What about non-Intel chips like the 320M?_9876 - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
Snow Leopard and later supports OpenCL on the 320M - even back to the 9400M and 8800M Nvidias. On the AMD side, support goes back to the 4600 series.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
"Support in dual adapter mode on Windows* 8: enables OpenCL workloads to be accelerated on Intel HD Graphics when the device is not directly connected to a display and fully enabled running Intel driver.I found the above the most interesting in the release notes as a consumer. Hopefully this will mean enthusiasts with discrete GPUs will eventually be able to make use of their Intel IGP as a co-processor for things like physics acceleration in games if OpenCL gets more adoption. It'd be great if Windows 7 got dual adapter mode support too.
mayankleoboy1 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
Can we have a small shootout of Intel OpenCL drivers VS AMD OpenCL drivers on AMD and Intel CPU's ? Last time i checked, AMD OpenCL drivers on Intel CPU's performed better than Intel drivers.extide - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
AMD's OpenCL drivers are for AMD GPU's not for the HD4000mayankleoboy1 - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
AMD's OpenCL drivers work on Sandy Bridge and below CPU's as a emulation of a GPU. The same way Intels OpenCL drivers enable OpenCL on SandyVridge CPU's, by emulating a compute GPU.