Sandy bridge, opencl

[Timocafe]

Hi,

I develop (Geneva University) blas mix/mode using blas CPU and cublas on GPU. Nevertheless I have also a similar version using blas CPU and opencl for the GPU (especially for ATI card).

My question is : Intel opencl does support the gpu part inside the sandy bridge ? Can we hope have a linux support of the intel sdk ?

Thus we could make the blas operation on CPU/GPU inside the same socket.

Thank you

Tim

[Panayiotis_P_]

Robert Ioffe (Intel) wrote:

Hi Panayiotis,

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-drivers#lin64.

May I ask if socket P, intel core 2 duo P9600 is supported? I installed same 15.1 driver on windows 8.1, all OpenCL 1.2 CPU tests working apart from  

CL CPU - 4D Quaternion Julia on GPU Caps Viewer

When I run the test I get the message:

OpenCL CPU context creation Failed  (CL error = -2). Bye.

Why do I get this message and I cannot run the test?? Is there a bug from the caps viewer app or the intel 15.1 openCL 1.2 driver??

Thanks Regards

Panayiotis

[Panayiotis_P_]

Dear Robert,

The OpenCL 1.2 driver for the sandy bridge works as already mentioned by you and confirmed by me for the CPU part only. For the sake of comparison, I have tested this (openCL 1.2 support) using guiminer to see how many mhash/s it produces. These are the results for i7-2640m

2 cores: 3.2 Mhash/s temperature 70 oC

4 cores: 6 Mhash/s temperature 80 oC.

The score seems to be very low.

Do you think if a GPU openCL 1.2 driver support is produced, then the performance increase will be considerably higher, say more than double and the temperature lower?????

The CPU support though as a project it is over welcomed, however the performance is considerably low and CPU temperature is high. I am not expecting miracles with this CPU/IGP, really I am not. But if a GPU support will increase considerably the performance in supported OpenCL applications, then it should be produced. Do you think there is such merit in producing an openCL 1.2 driver for the GPU part of 2nd gen sandy bridge with intel hd 3000????.

Regards

Panayiotis 

P.S.

I am not expecting to get an answer. What I am expecting you to understand Is the following. Since you don't plan to support your CPUs/GPUs combo for more than 3-4 years what do you think this behaviour (bad business, client lack of trust, unresponsive behavior, no driver development), will portray to your image in the long term. You do get a bad image by not supporting your older products, or not developing drivers. Don't you offer a  7 year life cycle support which you have on paper. I have been asking from intel for openGL 3.3 openCL 1.2 GPU and windows 10 driver support with widi enabled but I get no answer. Yeah you are too busy. Sorry I asked...........NOOOOOOOOT. but you should feel embarrassed if a client tells you to do your job better. Anyway. I have given up. I feel bad for asking and asking and asking and I just muted. I bought an external pci-e dock, bought a GT 730, and have directX 12 support windows 10 support openGL 4.4 support openCL 2.0 support Cuda DirectCompute 5.0 support 8rops 16tmus 384 shading units etc.

Well done intel. Your lack of support has cost me 170 euros. Where to send the bill to Mr Robert or Mr Amon???

[Robert_I_Intel]

Hi Panayiotis,

You have 217.6 GFlops available to you on the CPU side of your Sandy Bridge processor and only about 125 GFlops available on the GPU side, so even if Intel supported OpenCL on Sandy Bridge GPU, your benchmark most likely would not improve if run on the GPU. The first thing I would check is whether the benchmark is compiled with -mavx, so you are fully taking advantage of AVX instructions. Load balancing between CPU and GPU could have helped, so ideally you should have seen ~30% perf improvement, that is if you haven't hit the power envelope of the part, at which point the frequencies of both CPU and GPU would be brought down together with overall performance.

I completely agree with your sentiment with regards to full support of Sandy Bridge. The product is only 5 years old and should be fully supported. Unfortunately, I am having trouble persuading our driver folks to pay attention to Ivy Bridge bugs, let alone doing anything for Sandy Bridge. They are extremely resource constrained and focused on Kaby Lake and beyond. It is very unfortunate and as you said, creates a very bad reputation for us.

BTW, could you point me to the paper, which states 7 year support promise? Maybe I could show it to our management and get some sense into them.

Very sorry about the current state of affairs!

[Panayiotis_P_]

Hello Robert,

Thanks for the reply. Apologizing on behalf of intel mean a lot to me. I also thank you for your technical answer which is what I was after.

Unfortunately I cannot balance GPU/CPU openCL without having openCL gpu support too. This would probably help with my benchmark and CPU temperature. I don't know if AVX instructions are taken into account.

Here is the literature regarding the 7 years life cycle support that you can make use of. It is taken from another reply from intel forum, Widi in Window 10, regarding sandy bridge and intel hd 3000 lack of driver development expressing the same dissatisfaction.

I really hope that there is an intel developer/employee that can help towards improving intels image through better driver support.  It depends on Intel if they do really want to improve their image by providing better customer support through driver development, and taking more into account complaints and end users problems.

Here is the information you requested

hkiani wrote:

http://electronicdesign.com/microcontrollers/embedded-sandy-bridge

http://www.logicsupply.com/explore/io-hub/intel-adds-long-lifecycle-ivy-bridge-i3-cpu/

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/reference/N270ForEmbedded.pdf

"They all seem to suggest that the support cycle for the Intel Processor is 7 years; as the Graphics are bundles in the same chipset, the same 7 years support cycle would extend to the HD3000 graphics as well.

Additionally, as you are part of Intel shouldn't you have access to this information? It is ridiculous that an Intel employee is asking customers for documents showing how long Intel will support its products. Is Intel trying to limit or avoid their obligation to its products and customer by claiming Intel "forgot" how long it should support its products? Or some tactic to limit liablity in case of a potential lawsuit?"

And just to say an example of a different make external graphics card on my desktop PC with intel core 2 duo P9600. I had a problem with the drivers of the external GPU graphics card where underclocking the memory clock did not work when minning for bitcoins (guiminer or any other app), using overdrive settings of an AMD chip graphics card (Sapphire HD 7750), and also checking this with GPU-Z sensors tab (underclocking memory clock and increasing gpu core clock are the fundamentals for mining). I send a bug report to AMD and in 4 days a new driver was released correcting the bug (16.3 crimson driver).  The graphics card has a reporting an issue on its task bar settings for suggestions to AMD for quick correcting issues/bugs or adding suggestions. I bought the graphics card March 2011, if you want to make comparisons with the duration of the support period, same year the 2nd gen processor with intel hd 3000 was made available. It was updated to latest openGL 4.5 and and has openCL 1.2 GPU support. Still intel failed to update to at least openGL 3.3 (from 3.1) failed to add openCL GPU support and failed to support windows 10. And this is less than 5 years processors. My processor  was made 11/2011.

This is what intel should do for its graphics cards IGP and this is how long it should take for intel to respond with a new revised driver release, as a beta at least. We, the Sandy bridge 2nd gen intel hd 3000 owners, have been writing to intel forums, I managed to get a customer number, however no replies after the customer number was issued. This is totally a dissatisfaction process without customer respect.

My service ticket number is: 00287471. Never got a reply.

[Panayiotis_P_]

Does management read the forums???

If they don't they should, as part of customer care.

[Jonhson__John]

No, I need it to run a VF0800 or as you would say SR300 it's all the same and I may need it to build firmware on some computers that are not Windows 7. Mine will run 7, it's was 8 installing 7 does not work I would. So I person that once found a firmware and they were nice and posted it. But since then the post has been pulled. It's a Sony camera firmware.if you know what it please send it my way,

. Because 3D drivers do not like to install without a little bet " Legacy.". Thank. Put together a small amount of firmware and so I would have to guess at what may all be in it other than OpenCL 1.2 and the OpenC by its self does not last by its self. And I have run anothe, it's close but it is not a good Scotch. I run this old thing on windows 10 but Microsoft putting two into one made it crash. I had a USB save for a day like this but I lost it or used it.

[TimothyMadden]

Hello !

My Sandy Bridge laptop is still working great, despite the low-end CPU (after the SSD+RAM upgrade) !

But 11 years after the release, the SandyBridge iGP has no OpenCL driver, of any kind. The iGP has up to 2.5x more GFLOPS then the CPU (at the low end SKUs; at the top end the iGP gets close to the CPU cores).

Please Intel, SandyBridge is an Intel CPU just like the new Alder Lake is, can you release the OpenCL driver  ?

Best regards,

Timothy Madden

[AlHill]

@TimothyMadden    This thread is 11 years old.

You need to start a new thread.   And, to save you time, an OpenCL driver for a 2nd gen processor is not going to happen.

Doc (not an Intel employee or contractor)
[Maybe Windows 12 will be better]