Intel Graphics programming without openCl

[gerdich]

openCl 1.5 is not available for my u5400 (arrandale/nehalem like i5-540m, but without sse4).


Is there another way to access the assembler of the gpu?
Is there any way to run calculations on this cpu? (glsl is available).

Is there any description of the opcodes of the gpu?
Is there any driver to upload and run code on this gpu?

[Jim_Vaughn]

Hi gerdich,

Intel's OpenCL driver, as of version 1.5, only executes code on the CPU and vector exensions of the CPU such as SSE/AVX instructions. To say that another way even if their is an embedded GPU such as those on the later core i5 processors and many of the newer architectures it does not take advantage of those. This is a different approach than some other vendors are making where they support both the CPU and the embedded GPU. Though I have absolutely no knowledge of this I could not see intel moving forward without including such functionality in newer generation chips. If they do not their performance numbers in a number of calculations will likely be signifigantly lower than competiters who are able to take advantage of the additional power of these embedded parrellel processors. I would guess they have not included such fu

To answer some of your other questions more directly:

openCl 1.5 is not available for my u5400 (arrandale/nehalem like i5-540m, but without sse4).

A: As long as you have SSE 3 you can run the AMD opencl implementation on your processor I am al but 100% sure that you have that support on your processor. Granted it isn't supported but it works well in my tests on current hardware. It is not as efficent compared to the intel driver in many tests however if you don't have the SSE 4x that is required for the Intel driver this is likely your only OpenCL based option.

Is there any way to run calculations on this cpu? (glsl is available).
Certainly you can use GLSL to execute shader code on the GPU and for many problems you can get good performance but you will be limited by the lack of control over memory and other processing elements for many problem cases. For a simple intro into using shaders for image processing you can read an article written a while back by a college of mine here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/image-processing-opengl-and-shaders

Is there any description of the opcodes of the gpu?
Is there any driver to upload and run code on this gpu?
Is there another way to access the assembler of the gpu?
I am not familer enough with intel GPUs to fully answer this question so I will leave those to someone else.

[ARNON_P_Intel]

More information on hardware compatability of the Intel OpenCL SDK 1.5 can be found at:http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/opencl-release-notes/#2

For Intel Graphics details, you can start at:Quick ReferenceGuideto 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Graphics (HD Graphics)

Regards,

Arnon Peleg

[gerdich]

Thank you very very much for your very complete answer.
With Borland Delphi 7 I was able to run openCl on the CPU but not on the GPU using the dll of Intel.
Now I know why.


Following to this website:
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_Dual-Core/Intel-Pentium%20Dual-Core%20Mobile%20U5400%20CN80617006042AC.html

sse3 is supported and even ssse3.

So I will give a try to AMD's tools.
I was hoping that Intel could present anything. Because they know their hardware the best.

Know I hope that I will not get a mess with my dll's if I add AMD's.

(Perhaps I will work with d3dx Hlsl and precompiled shaders [with fxc.exe]. With this combination I can construct a little "library" of precompiled shaders.)

[Jim_Vaughn]

Glad I could help.

As for driver conflicts, it seems that, for the most part, the issues with multiple drivers have been resolved (on windows at least). I have machines with 5 different OpenCL platofrms without problems.