Intel OpenCL Beignet 1.2 Was Quitely Released, No Sign Of OpenCL 2.0 In Sight

Intel China developers quietly announced the release of their open-source Beignet 1.2 OpenCL implementation at the end of August for HD/Iris Graphics hardware. Beignet 1.2 continues supporting OpenCL 1.x while sadly their experimental OpenCL 2.0 branch hasn't been touched now in three months.

New to Beignet 1.2 is support for Kabylake and Broxton hardware. Beignet 1.2 also adds support for LLVM 3.7~3.8, adds Assembly debugging and profiling information, experimental double data type support for Broadwell and newer, cl_intel_subgroups extension support, OpenCL 2 workgroup built-in functions, an Android build, and various optimizations and bug-fixes.

It is a hearty release with the Broxton/Kabylake support, some new extensions, optimizations, and the Android build will please some users running Android on newer Intel hardware. However, it's sad that there still isn't any complete OpenCL 2.0 support. The OCL20 branch hasn't been touched now since early June. Unfortunately I haven't heard any indication from Intel about what their plans or road-map for supporting open-source OpenCL 2.0 on Linux is about, but hopefully we'll hear (or see) something soon.

More details on Beignet 1.2 can be found via 01.org.