The Intel press room announced that OpenCL support is now available (link).
- The new SDK broadens options for developers on Intel® architecture and includes tools, optimization guides and training. The SDK helps OpenCL developers improve performance and efficiency on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors and Intel® Xeon® processors
For those interested in using OpenCL to program the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor family will find the article, “OpenCL* Design and Programming Guide for the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor” to be a good resource.
- While OpenCL is a portable programming model, the performance portability is not guaranteed. Traditional GPUs and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor have different HW designs. Their differences are such that they benefit from different application optimizations. For example, traditional GPUs rely on the existence of fast shared local memory, which the programmer needs to program explicitly. Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor includes fully coherent cache hierarchy, similar to regular CPU caches, which automatically speed up memory accesses. Another example: while some traditional GPUs are based on HW scheduling of many tiny threads, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors rely on the device OS to schedule medium size threads. These and other differences suggest that applications usually benefit from tuning to the HW they’re intended to run on.
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