Intel News Archives

While it doesn't yet support OpenCL 2.0/2.1, Intel Open Source Technology Center's Beignet doesn't really get the attention it deserves and sadly isn't shipping out-of-the-box on most Linux distributions.

For those curious about the performance impact between the CPUFreq and P-State scaling drivers and the different scaling governors when using an Intel Core i5 "Skylake" CPU with the latest Linux 4.5 kernel, here are some fresh benchmarks.

Intel is prepping Cannonlake processor support inside the LLVM Clang compiler.

There isn't much a better joy in life than unexpectedly finding nine Intel latest-generation (Skylake) Xeon processors at your doorstep.

Intel engineers have put out their latest OpenSWR patch series for providing Mesa with a high-performance, scalable software rasterizer.

Taking a break from all my NVIDIA Vulkan Linux testing, I decided to install the Intel Anvil Vulkan driver on my main Fedora system this morning for taking the Skylake support for a test drive.

Following this morning's long-awaited Vulkan 1.0 release with our lengthy write-up and initial thoughts, Intel has joined NVIDIA in offering a Linux driver for Vulkan.

This week a batch of Intel DRM graphics driver updates landed in DRM-Next for in turn hitting the Linux 4.6 kernel when that merge window opens in a few weeks.

Topi Pohjolainen of Intel posted a set of 23 patches today for providing compression of single-sampled color surfaces / lossless compression within the Intel Mesa driver for Skylake "Gen9" and newer.

While Haswell processors have been available for a few years now, finally work is materializing on supporting the hardware's Observation Architecture.

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on speeding up color transformations for color management on Intel Linux systems using their Beignet OpenCL implementation for Iris/HD Graphics.

Our latest Intel Skylake processor to benchmark is a Xeon E3-1270 v5 processor that boasts a boost speed of 4.0GHz.

The xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver has been in development the past two and a half years without seeing an official release.

Intel has released their first new versions of XenGT and KVMGT for 2016 for GPU virtualization solutions for Xen and KVM, respectively.

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.

If you are interested in learning about Intel's GEN Assembly for being able to optimize and debug OpenCL kernels running on Intel's graphics hardware, there's a new Intel Developer Zone post explaining their Assembly.

Intel Open-Source Technology Center developer Ben Widawsky has written a blog post about frequency handling within the i915 DRM driver.

An Intel engineer yesterday published the initial experimental patch-set for implementing GuC-based Single Loop Power Controller (SLPC) support.

Beginning with Skylake and Broxton hardware, Intel began requiring firmware blobs as part of their open-source graphics driver stack. This binary firmware is continuing forward with the next-generation Kabylake processors.

If you are interested in the Intel NUC6i3SYK with its Core i3 Skylake CPU, benchmarks have been published on OpenBenchmarking.org.

While we've already been writing at length about the DRM graphics driver changes you will be able to find with the Linux 4.5 kernel, here's a nice overview of the Intel-specific i915 DRM graphics changes for this next version of the Linux kernel.

While Intel has already supported OpenCL 2.0 on Windows, under Linux the current Beignet project for open-source OpenCL is still limited to the 1.2 specification. Fortunately, in recent weeks the OpenCL 2.0 branch has seen some new activity.

Intel has committed all of the PCI IDs to Mesa and libdrm for the graphics processors of their next-generation Kabylake hardware.

Back on Christmas was news of patches for implementing tessellation shader support for Intel Ivy Bridge and Haswell graphics hardware after support had already landed for Broadwell and newer within the Mesa driver. Support for those older generations is now present in Mesa.

A few days ago Intel landed OpenGL tessellation support in their open-source driver as required by OpenGL 4. However, this initial implementation was limited to support Intel's Broadwell hardware and newer. With new patches, that is now changing.

The final feature pull request has been sent in of the Intel DRM graphics driver for targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel.

While Intel NUCs powered by Skylake have been announced for some time, it's still next to impossible to find these "NUC6" models at major Internet retailers. I'm told the situation should improve in early 2016, but fortunately there is some early Linux performance result data from two of these Skylake NUCs.

Intel recently added soft-pin support to their code within the DRM library (libdrm).

Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has some new code ready for testing on their DRM kernel graphics driver.

OpenGL ES 3.1 support is now enabled by default for Intel Gen 8 "Broadwell" graphics hardware and newer in Mesa.

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out the Mesa patches that would enable OpenGL ES 3.1 support by default for "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer.

Intel Broxton hardware now has open-source OpenCL compute support via the Open-Source Technology Center's Beignet project.

If Intel OTC developer Rodrigo Vivi has his way, the power-saving PSR functionality may finally be enabled by default for the Intel DRM graphics driver.

If you are building a new system around an Intel Xeon Skylake processor that features integrated graphics, you may have some out-of-the-box issues with current stable Linux distributions.

Intel has already queued up a lot of DRM graphics driver changes for Linux 4.5 and now they've sent out a DRM-Next pull request for another serving of updates for this next kernel cycle.

If you have a fast enough Intel graphics processor, Feral Interactive's Linux release of GRID Autosport should run if you are using the latest Mesa.

Intel developer John Harrison has published a set of 40 patches this morning for rolling out a GPU scheduler in the i915 DRM driver.

With the two new, low-end Broadwell laptops currently being tested, I was curious whether the Intel HD Graphics 5500 were any faster using Mesa 11.2-devel Git than the current Mesa 11.0 stable packages in Ubuntu 15.10.

Intel is hooking their Beignet open-source OpenCL Linux implementation into the CMRT, the 01.org C for Media Runtime.

Francisco Jerez just landed his massive set of Intel Mesa driver patches for enabling L3 atomics, the L3 partitioning state atom, and other code pertaining to L3 cache management.

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has done his usual recap of the i915 DRM graphics driver changes to be found in Linux 4.4.

Next week I'm building my first Intel Xeon Skylake system and will be running a number of tests of this processor prior to commissioning it for a new LinuxBenchmarking.com performance tracker.

Developers at Intel are working on Miracast support for X.Org and Wayland on Linux to transmit HDMI signals over wireless for desktop mirroring, etc.

Intel has finally published a new patch series for implementing the OpenGL 4.0 tessellation shader support within their Mesa DRI driver. It looks like this code is about ready to be finally mainlined!

A new version of intel-gpu-tools has been released, the package used to assist in debugging Intel Linux graphics driver issues.

The first batch of Intel DRM graphics driver changes targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel have landed into DRM-Next.

For those with some spare x86 tablet/mobile hardware around, a new test build of Android-x86 is out in the wild.

As it's been a while since last playing with Intel's Beignet project, the open-source effort to allow OpenCL compute capabilities on HD/Iris Graphics under Linux, I decided to try it out on an Ubuntu 15.10 system this weekend with a Skylake processor.

Beignet, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center project for implementing OpenCL on Linux for Intel HD/Iris Graphics, has gained some new functionality this week.

I've been meaning to pass along a bit of advice if you're trying to use Intel HD/Iris Graphics to drive a 4K display: you may need to use the Linux 4.3 kernel.