Intel Is Still Maintaining A Proprietary OpenCL Driver For Linux

While we frequently cover Beignet as Intel's open-source OpenCL driver effort for their graphics hardware, they do still continue maintaining a concurrent proprietary driver as well for their Linux customers.

After writing earlier today about the Intel GEN Assembly overview, I noticed they released an updated OpenCL proprietary Linux driver earlier this month. This binary blob supports OpenCL 1.2, which is the same version supported by Beignet, while they are working towards OpenCL 2.0 compliance.

This updated proprietary driver is just suited for 4th and 5th generation processors. The release notes for this month's binary driver update also acknowledge that Beignet is an alternative, "The intel-opencl-1.2-1.0 driver is a user-mode Linux device driver provided in binary format offering advantages such as interoperability with Intel Media Server Studio and a higher level of consistency in feature set with Intel’s OpenCL driver implementations for other operating systems. However, our Beignet project offers the advantages of an open-source implementation and support for existing Intel® AtomTM platforms. Please check it out and choose the solution that best meets your needs."

This driver is intended for use with their closed-source Media Server Studio, is primarily tested against RHEL/CentOS, and ships with some extra extensions atop the OpenCL 1.2 specification. This updated driver release adds support for the Linux 4.1 kernel, FP16 and FP64 support for 5th generation Core CPUs, support for out-of-order queues, and other changes.

More details on this proprietary Intel OpenCL Linux driver update can be found via this post.