Intel Beignet 0.9 Adds Bay Trail, OpenCL 1.2, Major Performance Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 26 June 2014 at 11:00 AM EDT. 5 Comments
INTEL
Beignet, Intel's method of supporting OpenCL compute under open-source Linux on the graphics cores within their modern processors, is out with a very significant release today.

Beignet 0.9 was released today and it's a hell of an update for Intel's OpenCL open-source stack that works in conjunction with their open-source Mesa/DRM driver code. Beignet 0.9 has added full support for 4th generation Intel Core CPUs (Haswell), Intel Bay Trail HD Graphics support, significant performance improvements, compile speed improvements, support for the OpenCL 1.2 specification, runtime library support separate from the compiler back-end, updated documentation, and much more.

Just how fast is Beignet 0.9? Zhigang Gong of Intel says that the Luxmark benchmark and some OpenCV test cases are 10~20x faster than the earlier Beignet! Additionally, compile speeds of OpenCL kernels are about 30% faster. The OpenCL 1.2 specification support and new hardware enablement are also significant, though no apparent support yet for Broadwell processors.

Those wishing to learn more about Beignet 0.9 can find out about all of the changes in full via the release announcement. It's likely about time we will try benchmarking Beignet for Intel OpenCL support under Linux... With OpenCL 1.2 spec compliance, etc, it seems a step ahead of what's currently offered by the OpenCL (Clover) Gallium3D state tracker used by the Radeon and Nouveau open-source graphics drivers on Linux.
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