MKL Hardware Requirements

[ids-removed295]

We recently "upgraded" to MKL v7.2 and our application no longer runs on the Celeron CPU. Is this cpu no longer supported? Which cpus are supported? Is there by chance a simple C-based method for checking a given machine that it has capable hardware?

Beau Paisley

Harmonic Software, www.omatrix.com

[TimP]

Who would know what you mean by "the" Celeron CPU, or what symptoms you see? Older Celerons should be at least P-III compatible, but would not run with the P4 library. If your MKL build is checking at run time to see which style code it should run, the code used is far from simple. If it makes a mistake, please submit an issue at premier.intel.com, giving the requested details.

[ids-removed295]

We are using the .DLLs, and our understanding is the MKL decides at run-time which to select. We don't generally support Celeron so we are not familiar if it is P4, P3, or even less capable.

Once again. Is there a C-code base way we can check within code if the current cpu is supported. In the old days you had a cpuid() function, but we were hoping that there is now a cleaner way to make this check within our code.

Beau Paisley, Harmonic Software

[Todd_R_Intel]

You might check out the version information functions in MKL. There is some information in the technical user notes

http://www.intel.com/software/products/mkl/docs/mklusew.htm#Obtaining%20Version%20Information

and there are some example programs showing use of these functions in the examples/versionquery subdirectory of Intel MKL.

Perhaps it will be helpful.

Todd

[ids-removed295]

Todd,

Thank you for the tip, but that's not it. Those functions are for obtaining version information about the MKL library. What needs to be provided is a way at run-time to determine the capability of the processor. e.g. isSupportedCpu(). We are finding that many older Celeron cpus, and older Athlon cpus are not supported by any of the libraries provided with MKL which is fine, but we need to be able to tell during startup of our application so we can post an error to the end user.

Much Appreciated,

Beau

[Todd_R_Intel]

I'm not aware of any function(s) in the library that will fit your needs. I'll let the team know of your request. I'm sure the team would welcome submission of afeature request.

-Todd