OpenCL and dual adapter mode Win8 only? what about Win7?

[SyntheticPrime]

 Support in dual adapter mode on Windows* 8: enables OpenCL workloads to be accelerated on Intel HD Graphics when the device is not directly connected to a display and fully enabled running Intel driver.

Am I reading this right, this great feature is only supported on Win8? I want Win7 support also...

The ability to use the iGPU on a Core i7 3770k or Core i7 4770k is wasted when used with a dedicated GPU and the iGPU could be used as a nice co-processor for Physics and other items....

Please tell me tha Intel is going to support Win7 with this eventually?

Thanks!

[Raghupathi_M_Intel]

As I understand, the latest driver (15.31) supports DX 11 on both Win7 and Win8, which is key to enabling HD Graphics without an active display.

You can download the latest driver from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Default.aspx?lang=eng.

Thanks,
Raghu

[SyntheticPrime]

Hello Raghu,

So, I am to take this as, if I update the driver to 15.31.3071 on laptop or desktop CPUs I will have the ability to use the iGPU as a OpenCL processor on Win 7 also... Can you give me a test program to try this out with?

Thanks!

[Raghupathi_M_Intel]

Unfortunately I don't have any samples to demonstrate this. But we will consider this for a future release. Are you looking to see how this works or do you have a need to offload processing to processor graphics while using the discrete GPU for rendering? Can you explain your needs?

Thanks,
Raghu

[SyntheticPrime]

Raghu Muthyalampalli (Intel) wrote:

Unfortunately I don't have any samples to demonstrate this. But we will consider this for a future release. Are you looking to see how this works or do you have a need to offload processing to processor graphics while using the discrete GPU for rendering? Can you explain your needs?

Thanks,
Raghu

e.g.

If you are a gamer and have a dedicated GPU you could use the iGPU as a Physics processor to speed up Bullet API or Havok if Havok has been ported to OpenCL... this would be a good selling point to gamers who need a reason to upgrade their CPUs... More sales! This would allow the GPU to concentrate on graphics only. Also if the gamer is on a low end GPU this would just help overall performance, as the iGPU is wasted space and many aren't to happy about this in the forums among enthusiasts as they have no need for the iGPU but this could change some minds.

or

for scientific computing using OpenCL and throw the results in OpenGL for a visual data representation....

Win7 is a must as the market share is huge and lots of power users aren't going to adopt Win8 as it's not a desktop environment desktop users want.

What about Linux support for this?

Thanks!

[ARNON_P_Intel]

Hi,

We understand the usages, and for this we enbled this new feature. Unfortunately, also the extenstion is supported, to get this mode working with Intel and a 3rd party card you will need OS support, and this support works only with Win8. So no option to use it with Win7, sorry.

Arnon

[SyntheticPrime]

Arnon Peleg (Intel) wrote:

Hi,

We understand the usages, and for this we enabled this new feature. Unfortunately, also the extension is supported, to get this mode working with Intel and a 3rd party card you will need OS support, and this support works only with Win8. So no option to use it with Win7, sorry.

Arnon

What is it in Win8 that you specifically need? I hope it's not something to do with DX11.1 as you should be using OpenGL with OpenCL to keep this cross platform... and Intel has OpenGL 4+ drivers so that is up to Intel on what to support and if IB or Haswell IGP support Dx11.1 no reason why GL4.3 shouldn't be supported also on a hardware level... unless you can tell me reasons why....

Other than marketing reasons to push people to WIn8 I can't see a technical reason to be locked to Win8.

Thanks

[MSimm2]

Windows 8 has WDDM 1.2 (Windows Display Driver Model).
In the Windows driver stack, OpenGL,OpenCL and DirectX sit on top of the WDDM driver.
My understanding is that its WDDM 1.2 that supports the graphics hardware being active without a monitor attached.

That said.. Its possible to write a non video card driver to talk to the hardware and layer openCL on top of that.
Nvidia did this with there TCC Windows driver drivers for their Tesla cards.
see http://http.developer.nvidia.com/ParallelNsight/2.1/Documentation/UserGuide/HTML/Content/Tesla_Compute_Cluster.htm

I'd imagine Intel might create such a driver for their Xeon CPU's with integrated GPUs once they realise that they don't have to put all their eggs in the one basket with xeon phi. For this to happen though they would need to enable cl_khr_fp64 and boost its performance to at least be equal the CPU for simple workloads.

[SyntheticPrime]

Well for whatever technical reason, it should be overcome with some kind of work around... This is kind of a big deal IMO.... the performance benefits are to great to be left sitting idle.