Intel Releases Beignet 1.0 For Open-Source OpenCL

After two years of development by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center China crew, Beignet 1.0.0 was released this week for providing open-source OpenCL support on Linux.

Beignet originally just started supporting Ivy Bridge when the GPGPU capabilities were added to the Intel HD Graphics, but has since kept up in supporting newer hardware including Haswell and Bay Trail and now with the Beignet 1.0 release is Broadwell support.

Besides the Beignet 1.0 release being significant for adding Broadwell support, there's big performance improvements to find with this new release. Intel engineers are reporting between 10% and 4x performance improvements over the older version of Beignet.

Some of the other specific changes for Beignet 1.0 for OpenCL Linux support include optimized constant buffer loads, memory leak bug fixes, Clang and ICC compiler support, faster kernel compilation times, implemented missing LLVM intrinsics, optimized various passes, and numerous other bug-fixes.

Find more about Beignet 1.0 via the Intel release announcement.