Intel releases alpha OpenCL SDK for Core
Peter Clarke
11/17/2010 10:10 AM EST
LONDON – Intel, the worlds’ largest chip vendor, is now providing an implementation of the OpenCL 1.1 standard optimized for Intel Core processors running Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Windows Vista operating systems.
OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming that is being championed by the Khronos Group industry consortium.
The OpenCL SDK is an alpha release that can be downloaded from Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) for free and is intended to support software developers and help them take advantage of SIMD extensions and multiple cores on Intel Core processors.
OpenCL has the advantage of offering a uniform programming environment thereby supporting portable code for client and server computers and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs and other parallel processors. As a Khronos founder and promoter, Intel has made contributions to the OpenCL feature set.
Intel said that as this is only an alpha release intended as a technology preview Intel is not providing any warranty that the SDK works as expected or will be supported as is in the future.
Although Nvidia is a member of the Khronos Group it has its own CUDA technology as an approach to processing on parallel graphics chips.
Intel is apparently some way behind Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in offering support for OpenCL.
Meanwhile ARM Holdings plc has said that its Mali-T604 graphics processing core marks the start of merged CPU-GPU processing for it.
Related links and articles:
www.khronos.org
News articles:
Khronos upgrades parallel programming standard
AMD rolls OpenCL parallel programming tool
MathWorks supports Nvidia’s graphics chips
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210812/Intel-releases-alpha-OpenCL-SDK-for-Core?cid=NL_MCU
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