Intel OpenCL Applications XE 2013 SDK Released

An SDK for OpenCL Applications XE 2013 started as a beta program in December but has just been released as a full production version by Intel (News - Alert). Developers now have new options to develop on Intel platforms, with tools, optimization guides and training. OpenCL developers will find a greater ability to improve performance and efficiency on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and Intel Xeon processors, as well as managing extremely high parallel applications for high performance computing workstations, data analytics and other uses.

The SDK will benefit developers of Windows and Linux based systems. The software will support OpenCL developers that wish to take advantage of CPU found on many OpenCL workloads. The language and Application Programming Interface (API) will enable developers to seamlessly take advantage of the Intel Core processor benefits such as Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel SSE) utilization and Multi-Core scalability.

Significant changes appear to affect the areas of performance in task scheduling, automated data prefetching, and implicit vectorization. Intel says that faster data transfers to hosts/devices have also been made. The release is primarily targeted towards content creation applications such as music creation, photo and video editing. It is expected to provide better performance and battery life on low-power Intel platforms running Windows 7 or 8. Intel has been making the move to OpenCL in order to exploit many-core architectures and its integrated GPUs.

OpenCL is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. These include platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), DSPs and other types of processors. OpenCL is maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. It has been adopted by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Altera, Samsung, Vivante and ARM (News - Alert) Holdings.

Intel's SDK for OpenCL Applications XE 2013 IDE is a free download for Windows, Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux.