Intel Xeon Phi and OpenCL

Does the Intel Xeon Phi support OpenCL? It has been hard to get a definitive official answer, but all the signs point to “yes”.

Take this story on HPCWire about Accelereyes adding Xeon Phi support to their well-known ArrayFire library through OpenCL. Then there is Intel’s marketing material PDF showing OpenCL as an example of languages that run on the Xeon Phi. There was also an interview of Yariv Aridor of Intel, who was described as leading the implementation of OpenCL on Xeon Phi.

Intel already has a x86 implementation for their Core processors. So, at least for basic support, getting it working on Xeon Phi requires two things. First, they need to add support in the runtime to support the OpenCL APIs such as allocating memory etc. Second, they need to add support in the kernel compiler for the new 512-bit vector instructions in the Xeon Phi instead of AVX on Core processors. Both are certainly doable and does not require a big investment from Intel so there is not much reason for them to not support OpenCL. After all, Intel has traditionally been very good at supporting as many languages on their platform as they can.

I would say, we are definitely going to see OpenCL on Xeon Phi, which is very good news for the OpenCL ecosystem.