Access to older CPU-only OpenCL runtime packages for compatibility issues

[Achille_P_]

Would it be possible to provide access to the previous releases of the Intel OpenCL CPU-only runtime packages (e.g., 2012 and early 2013 versions)?

The problem is that since some point in 2013, the updated runtime stopped working on a significant number of our customers' machines (I guess it's because of the SSE 4.2 requirement). It would just be great to still provide access to those files in order to provide our customers to roll-back to a compatible version of the runtime, since newer releases are not back-compatible and since our customers cannot run our software anymore, nor undo changes...

I would also like to point out the fact that I find questionable to enumerate CPU-devices that are going to fail the context initialization among the ones available within the Intel OpenCL CPU platform: why not discarding them immediately?

Thanks!

[Raghupathi_M_Intel]

Hi,

Please take a look at the system requirements at https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdk-for-opencl-applications-release-notes. If your client systems meet these requirements you should be able to run OpenCL applications on them and the runtime should be backward compatible. If not please provide more details and we'll try to help resolve the issue.

Raghu

[Achille_P_]

Hi,

thanks for the quick reply. To make a long story short, we can focus on one of our machines running on an Intel Core2 Quad Q9300 processor. We have been using this machine for OpenCL development for about 1 year and a half, starting with the Intel OpenCL CPU-only runtime provided in 2012 (supporting OpenCL 1.1) and then by regularly updating the runtime each time a newer version was available. We managed to update and use newer version of the CPU-only runtime also in early 2013, including OpenCL 1.2. 

Then, at some point, after upgrading to the latest runtime version (I think with the second or third release of 2013), we have no longer been able to initialize a valid context. The device is still enumerated within the devices of the Intel platform during the context creation, but when we invoke clCreateContext we get a "device not available" error. 

This machine was working finely with the older versions of the CPU runtime, so I guess that support for this specific processor must have been discontinued during to 2013. Several of our customers got the same problem with processors of about the same age.

In this blog entry of 2011 there's a list of devices that have been reported as working with the Intel CPU runtime (and that list includes our and several of our customers' CPUs):

http://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2011-12-29/opencl-hardware-support/

So: what happened with the most recent releases? Hardware support for AVX/SSE4.2 became mandatory? Is it possible to still provide the older runtime installers, just to give breath to our customers until they will upgrade they hardware?

Thanks a lot!

Achille

[Manuel_D_]

Hello.

Exactly the same story here. I really need some CPU runtime drivers for my Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 with SSE4.1.

The only older version i've found is the runtime 2013 r2 (http://registrationcenter.intel.com/irc_nas/3608/intel_sdk_for_ocl_applications_2013_r2_runtime_x64_setup.msi), but it does not work and it seems that 2013 r1 or 2012 runtime is needed.

It should be possible to give just some download-links like the one above to the prior versions. That would be very very nice!

Many thanks in advance.

Manuel

[ARNON_P_Intel]

Thanks for the inputs, 

At this point we don't provide direct access and support to old runtimes. We will continue to explore this option.

Regards,

Arnon