Intel ISPC 1.20 Released: Smaller & Faster

Intel software engineers have released a new version of their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) as their C language variant with extensions for enhancing single-program, multiple-data programming for both CPUs and GPUs.

With the Intel ISPC 1.20 release on Friday, the ISPC binaries are now both smaller and faster. The ISPC binaries are said to be reduced by about one-third compared to their prior size. Meanwhile ISPC 1.20 should also be "a few percent" faster than prior releases. ISPC 1.20 also adds optional Snap packaging support for Ubuntu.

The Intel ISPC 1.20 release has also now split the ISPC run-time into CPU and GPU portions that are then loaded dynamically, so you aren't always loading the GPU code if you end up only relying on this ISPC run-time for CPU execution. The ISPC 1.20 run-time also now supports fences for GPU/CPU asynchronous computations, dropping its OpenMP run-time dependency but requiring Intel Threaded Building Blocks (TBB), and SSE4 target refactoring.

Downloads and more details on the Intel ISPC 1.20 release for Windows and Linux systems via GitHub.