I have a Samsung r60+ laptop with an AMD Mobility Radeon x2300.
Can I use it for OpenCL development?
I have installed the latest AMD SDK, but I only see the CPU compute device.
I am using Linux, but I am able to use Windows if necessary.
I do not think that AMD currently supports OpenCL for the mobility x2300. This source shows all the OpenCL devices that are supported by AMD OpenCL.
You could always write code for your CPU now, and then use the same kernel to operate on the GPU, when you get a supported device. But note that you probably won't get optimal performance on the GPU at first.
Related
I have two GPUs installed on my machine. I am working with library which uses OpenCL acceleration that only support one GPU and it is not configurable. I can not tell it which one I want. It seems that this library for some reason chose one of my GPUs that I do not want.
How can I delete/stop/deactivate this GPU from being supported as an OpenCL device?
I want to do this so I get only one supported GPU and the library will be forced to use it.
Note: Any option that contains change or edit the library is available for me.
P.S. I am on Windows 10 with Intel processor and Intel GPU + NVidia GPU
On Windows the OpenCL ICD system uses Registry entries to find all of the installed OpenCL platforms.
Solution: Using RegEdit you can backup and then remove the entry for the GPU you do not want to use. The Registry location is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Khronos\OpenCL\Vendors.
Reference: https://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/extensions/khr/cl_khr_icd.txt
What is the difference between Intel, AMD and Khronos OpenCLs. I am totally new to OpenCL and want to start with it. I don't know which one is better to install on my operating system.
OpenCL is an "extension" to C and C++ languages that enables parallelization of software on your compute devices: CPU, GPU, etc.
OpenCL is defined by a standard (created by Khronos Group) and implemented by hardware vendors Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc.. So each OpenCL implementation requires a vendor specific OpenCL driver that will enable the usage of the vendor's hardware.
So to conclude, if you have an Intel based system, use the Intel OpenCL because only so you would be able to use all compute devices in your machine. The same goes if you have an AMD system. Also, take note that there is no Khronos OpenCL implementation.
Of course you can have a platform with OpenCL enabled devices from multiple vendors (e.g. Intel CPU+GPU and nVidia discrete card). In this case the OpenCL runtime contains a generic layer (a dynamic loaded library). This layer is an interface which calls the implementations provided in each device driver depending on the selected OpenCL platform.
OpenCL is a standard defined by Kronos. They distribute header files that you have to give to your compiler. They do not distribute binaries to link against. For that, you must get an ICD (Installable Client Driver), on Windows this is in the form of a DLL file. You will get it from installing one or more of...
Nvidia drivers (if you have an Nvidia GPU)
AMD drivers (if you have an AMD GPU or an AMD CPU)
Intel Drivers (if you have an Intel CPU, also some Intel CPU's have built in GPU's).
Do not worry about compiling against one vendor and it not working on another, OpenCL has been carefully designed to work around this. Compile against any version you have, it will work with any other version that is the same or newer, regardless of who made it.
Be Aware, the AMD OpenCL driver will operate as an OpenCL driver for Intel CPU's. If, for example, you have an AMD GPU and an Intel CPU, and have installed the Intel OpenCL driver and the AMD OpenCL driver, the AMD driver will report that it can provide both a GPU device and a CPU device (your CPU), and the Intel driver will report having a CPU device (also your CPU) and most likely also a GPU device (the GPU that is on the Intel CPU die, for example on an i7-3770, this will be a HD4000). If you blindly ask OpenCL for "All CPU's available" you will get the AMD drivers and the Intel drivers offering you the same CPU. Your code will not run very well in this case.
On Windows it is expected that you will download the header files yourself, and then either create a library from the DLL (MSVC), or link directly against the DLL (Mingw & Clang default behavior).
On Linux, you package manager will likely have a library to link against, consult your distributions documentation regarding this. On Ubuntu and Debian this command will work...
sudo apt-get install ocl-icd-opencl-dev
On Mac, there is nothing to install, and trying to install something will likely damage your system. Just install Xcode, and use the framework "OpenCL".
There are other platforms, for example Android. Some FPGA vendors offer OpenCL libraries. Consult your vendors documentation.
Khronos defines OpenCL standard. Each vendor/ open source will implement that standards.
Khronos defines set of conformance tests which need to pass if a vendor claims that his opencl implementation is as per standard.
If I write a desktop application that requires OpenGL and OpenCL (and communication between the two--rendering based on opencl calculations), what are the situations where users will not be able to use it? Are we at the point where OpenCL is pretty much available on all desktops and laptops in the last 3 years?
All recent discrete GPUs support OpenCL, as do AMD APUs and CPUs. All Intel CPUs can be supported using the AMD APP SDK. Intel's OpenCL SDK has some limits on which CPUs and which Intel GPUs it supports. Therefore, your application will always be able to fall back to using the CPU if no supported GPUs are available. I have yet to meet a desktop without OpenGL. If everything is installed properly then you shouldn't have any problems.
Your biggest problems will come from driver bugs in both OpenCL and OpenGL implementations - my friends and I have seen a lot of this over the years.
I am new in OpenCL. I have an Dell XPS 1645 laptop which has ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 graphics card and a Intel CPU. I saw that AMD's software does not support OpenCL stuff for my graphics card but in Khronos website, my video card is seen as OpenCL supported. So, what do I have to do to start OpenCL programming? Also, can I use AMD's software which is for OpenCL?
It looks like you have a laptop with Windows 7, an Intel Core i7 CPU with 4 cores and hyper-threading?
Well OpenCL can run on CPU's as well as GPU's. With this model won't be able to access the GPU as an OpenCL device, but you can still use the CPU as an OpenCL device.
So download the OpenCL SDK from Intel or AMD, or both. Install it and try the examples.
You will have the change the calls to
clGetDeviceIds( .... )
so that the device type specified is always CL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU
With some friends we want to use openCL. For this we look to buy a new computer, but we asked us the best between AMD and Intel for use of openCL. The graphics card will be a Nvidia and we don't have choice on the graphic card, so we start to want buy an intel cpu, but after some research we figure out that may be AMD cpu are better with openCL. We didn't find benchmarks which compare the both.
So here is our questions:
Is AMD better than Intel with openCL?
Is it a matter to have a Nvidia card with an AMD cpu for the performance of openCL?
Thank you,
GrWEn
You shouldn't care as much about what CPU you use as much as what GPU you use. You would need to choose between an AMD/ATI GPU or nVidia GPU.
I would personally recommend an nVidia GPU as, in addition to OpenCL support, you can experiment with their more proprietary CUDA technology which offers a far richer development experience than OpenCL does today. While you're at it take a look at the new AMP technology that was just announced by Microsoft for C++ which aims to bring language extensions akin to nVidia's CUDA. nVidia also has offerings for the enterprise with their Tesla GPUs with several vendors offering GPU clusters and you can even get a GPU compute cluster on Amazon EC2 now which is all based on nVidia hardware.
You want to buy a new computer with your friends? What kind of project do you plan to do? The question about the hardware is answered with the needs you have. If you give some more information, we can provide better suggestions.
As written before, the CPU is not the important point as long as you do not want to buy a multiprocessor multicore system like 4 Quadprocessors. The difference in performance is mostly the differences of the GPUs used and there you can find different cards for all needs. From a cheap GPU to the nVidia Tesla cards.
It is definitely not a problem to run a nVidia board on a AMD system. I do it here. You also can use the OpenCL devices from the AMD Multicore CPU and the nVidia GPU in parallel.
You should pay attention: If you plan to buy a potent system to run your software (like a webserver), every developer of OpenCL software needs a system for testing. So every developer needs at least a modern multi-core CPU with an OpenCL SDK. Where the OpenCL kernels are developed does not matter. OpenCL is platform independed.
Both Intel and AMD have good OpenCL-support for their CPUs, so currently it does not really matter which you cooose. If you want to use the embedded GPU on AMD Fusion or Intel SandyBridge, then I suggest you go for Fusion since Intel does not have a driver for their GPUs (yet). Depending on what you are going to use OpenCL for, I could suggest a GPU - sometimes NVidia is faster, sometimes AMD.
AMP, CUDA, RenderScript and the many, many others all work nice but they don't work on all hardware as OpenCL does. CUDA certainly has advantages, but in the time you have learnt openCL I can assure you the tools around OpenCL have catched up.
The CPU has no influence on GPU OpenCL performance.
You might also want to try running the OpenCL kernels on CPU. Checkout the Intel OpenCL compiler beta. You can even run kernels on both CPU and GPU.