Trying Out Intel's OpenCL 2.0 Beignet On Broadwell-U

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 28 April 2017 at 03:36 AM EDT. 2 Comments
INTEL
Curious about the Beignet OpenCL performance impact on a Broadwell-U laptop/ultrabook and just going through bare metal benchmarking withdrawals while away this week in Russia, I was running some Beignet tests on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

The X1 Carbon with me is equipped with the Intel Core i7-5600U, while older, I was curious about its Beignet OpenCL performance impact. Beignet 1.3 released earlier this year was their first release with OpenCL 2.0 support and a major milestone considering that open-source OpenCL drivers are generally lacking and far from desirable.
Darktable Beignet

The Beignet 1.3 testing as found with Fedora 25 x86_64 has been working out well. Beignet 1.3 was in conjunction with Mesa 13.0.4 and Linux 4.10 via other F25 package updates.
Darktable Beignet

Darktable Beignet

In testing with the Darktable RAW photography software, Beignet 1.3 for OpenCL acceleration on Broadwell-U was indeed faster than just using the CPU code-paths.
Darktable Beignet

Though in at least some cases, Darktable's OpenCL vs. CPU performance is close.
Darktable Beignet

Darktable Beignet

But in Blender 3D modeling, the OpenCL code with Beignet was actually slower... This may be due to Blender's OpenCL code-paths lagging behind, but at least that will be fixed in their next major release with much better OpenCL support.

More Beignet CL tests coming...
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