Intel Releases OpenCL SDK XE 2013 For Linux

Intel released yesterday the Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications XE 2013. This is an OpenCL SDK for Linux that supports OpenCL 1.2 and all of the latest and greatest Intel hardware.

Intel's already been shipping their OpenCL SDK for Linux in years prior, albeit sadly it's closed-source and only runs on the CPU. This OpenCL XE 2013 for Linux continues to only work on the CPU side and doesn't support GPU integration for Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors. (On Windows, however, there is the OpenCL GPU support.) With OpenCL SDK XE 2013, there's new features and improvements.

The Intel SDK for OpenCL XE 2013 supports the OpenCL 1.2 full profile features for Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi co-processors, now supports multiple Intel Xeon Phi co-processors running on a single system, and there's OpenCL performance improvements.

The improved performance with this SDK comes through improvements in task scheduling, auto-data pre-fetching, and implicit vectorization. There's also faster host/device data transfer.

The Intel OpenCL SDK XE 2013 officially supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. This Intel OpenCL 1.2 SDK can be downloaded for free from the OpenCL SDK XE web-page. There's also the 2013 release notes with more information.

For those interested in open-source Intel OpenCL support, that's through the challenging Beignet project.