POCL 0.9 Is Coming Soon For Better Open-Source OpenCL

POCL, the open-source project formerly known as Portable OpenCL, will see its version 0.9 release in the next month with many improvements.

POCL is now known as the Portable Computing Language and aims to be an open-source implementation of OpenCL with support for CPU and GPUs/accelerators. POCL is based upon the LLVM compiler infrastructure and has picked up a lot of OpenCL functionality so far in its young lifespan thus far.

POCL 0.9 was branched in its Bazaar repository yesterday and the plan is now to ship as release candidate as soon as the last remaining issues are addressed. The POCL 0.9 release is planned to come no earlier than 8 January, but could be delayed if additional release candidates are warranted.

POCL 0.9 has major improvements to the kernel compiler's vectorization performance (can be 2x faster for some benchmarks), support for most Piglit OpenCL tests, new runtime/platform API support from OpenCL, preliminary support for OpenCL 2.0 blocks, new built-in functions, and many performance improvements throughout.

More details on the upcoming Portable Computing Language 0.9 release can be found from the branching email on the SourceForge mailing list and then the features and other improvements are documented via their Bzr CHANGES file.