Intel Develops A SPIR-V Translator To Run On The CPU

It's not a CPU-based Vulkan implementation or along those lines, but Intel's newest open-source project allows converting SPIR-V into optimized instructions for running on modern CPUs.

This effort is about taking SPIR-V kernels -- the IR now of Vulkan and OpenCL and can also be ingested with OpenGL 4.6 -- and turning them into the Intel SPC (ISPC) instructions for their SPMD program compiler.

These SPIR-V kernels are turned into x86 code that are vectorized with SSE, AVX2 and AVX512 for efficient execution on CPUs. Intel views their current work as a starting solution and isn't yet full-featured nor fully optimized for performance. It is though already working with various Vulkan compute examples and more.

Learn more at software.intel.com while the open-source translator code can be found on GitHub.