Accelerating Color Management With OpenCL On Intel Hardware

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on speeding up color transformations for color management on Intel Linux systems using their Beignet OpenCL implementation for Iris/HD Graphics.

Intel developers have been working on adding OpenCL support to the Quick Color Management System (QCMS) as used by the Chrome and Firefox web-browsers for color management for JPEG/PNG/WebP images containing an embedded ICC profile. While QCMS supports SIMD instructions for making the color transformations faster on CPUs, Intel is trying to make it much more efficient by using OpenCL on GPUs.

They concluded, "The best speedup was obtained on the 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7’s GPU: 1.5x over the single core CPU running at 4 GHz. OpenCL performance on the 4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 processor with local memory was significantly worse, but that is to be expected given the lower number of execution units and the memory restrictions imposed by the algorithm. Still, the HD 530 brings significant improvements to the state of the art, and is able to outperform the CPU with the correct optimizations."

More details via this 01.org blog post.