Benchmarks That Intel's Beignet OpenCL Compute Stack Can Handle

While it doesn't yet support OpenCL 2.0/2.1, Intel Open Source Technology Center's Beignet doesn't really get the attention it deserves and sadly isn't shipping out-of-the-box on most Linux distributions.

Beignet officially is at OpenCL 1.2 compliance while there is slow progress on their OpenCL 2.0 branch. Beignet is designed to support from Intel Ivy Bridge HD Graphics and newer, but obviously most of the work these days is focused around the more recent generations of Intel graphics processors.

If you are behind in your knowledge of Beignet, see their FreeDesktop.org project site.

For some reference tests in being curious what OpenCL benchmarks can run these days on Beignet, I did some Beignet 1.2 tests on Ubuntu 15.10 with Linux 4.5 Git from an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system.

I was able to get many OpenCL benchmarks running out-of-the-box with the current state of Beignet's OpenCL 1.2 support on this Core i5 Skylake system. This is much better than the OpenCL Clover state with OpenCL 1.1 support and barely any of the usual CL test suspects running there due to currently missing image support and more. Beignet continues to be more useful to end-users than Clover Gallium3D for other open-source driver users.

If you want to dig through the individual i5-6600K OpenCL results, go to this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. To compare your own system's OpenCL performance against the results in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1602221-GA-LUXING55250. I'll be back shortly with a more thorough Intel OpenCL comparison with the current state of Beignet if there is enough reader interest.