OpenCL on Ubuntu 12.10 with Intel CPU

5/4/2013

If you are trying to get some test scripts running on Ubuntu 12.10 and you can't get the Intel SDK to work, here's a handy tip. Go over to the AMD website and download their AMD APP SDK. As long as your CPU supports SSE, the AMD SDK will provide you with OpenCL capabilities on any processor.

I was having trouble getting Intel's SDK to work, as well as their open source variant Beignet. Both versions did not reckognize any OpenCL platforms or devices. I am on a Intel Core I5 CPU with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (it's a shame I can't use that on Ubuntu yet, though I am happy to be running sample code now :-)).

For your convenience, here are the steps to download and install OpenCL on Ubuntu:

First, download the SDK. At the time of writing, the newest version is version 2.8.1.0. For 32 bit platforms:

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/files/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8.1.0-lnx32.tgz

Or for 64 bit platforms:

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/files/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8.1.0-lnx64.tgz

Extract the file you just downloaded and run the installer:

$ tar -xzvf AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8*-lnx*.tgz
 $ sudo ./Install-AMD-APP.sh

As a final step reboot your computer and then you should be able to run OpenCL applications on Ubuntu.

Update August 19th, 2013: updated AMD APP SDK download links from version 2.8 to version 2.8.1.0 and updated recommended download method, thanks to Jacek for pointing that out!

5 Comments

Jacek Królikowski link

8/18/2013 07:30:42 am

Thanks man, you just saved me hours of headache. The install went flawlessly and contained everything you might need: c++ headers, lots of (compiling) samples and so on.

Let me know when I can buy you a beer ;)

Also: the links you provided are correct, but don't work with wget, since they are gated and require you to accept some agreement - you could add a note about that so that people don't get discouraged :)

webdevelopersdiary

8/18/2013 03:11:20 pm

Hi Jacek, glad to hear it was of help to you :-) Thanks for telling me about the license page before downloading, I updated the article! Please let me know the area, who knows, I travel a lot and might end up catching a beer with you ;-)

Justus Gadient

9/6/2013 12:54:52 am

Thanks a lot, too, but ... ;-).

I have an elderly intel core 2 quadcore PC with a (new) AMD Radeon graphics device and run openclinfo, everything ok.
(AMD GPUs are 'visible' even to Intel-SDK).

Then I bought a Samsung 7 Ultrabook (i7 with HD 4000 + AMD Radeon HD 8550M opencl supports they say). I can link Intel- OR AMD-SDK libopencl,
they only 'see' CPU-Cores, no HD 4000 GPU, no AMD GPU. (PS: OS is 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS))
Do I have to link something else or miss something?

Kind Regards

Justus

webdevelopersdiary

9/17/2013 10:45:37 pm

Hi Justus,

You didn't miss anything. Unfortunately the HD4000 GPU is not supported on Linux (yet). Intel has started an open source project called 'Beignet' to make this happen, but it's still far away from being usable. For now you are stuck with using the CPU on Ubuntu. If you want to use the HD4000 with OpenCL, you have to boot into Windows :(

Justus

9/17/2013 11:56:39 pm

Thanks for your reply..., so I look forward to intels 2014 SDK for Ubuntu ;-) like a child for XMas.
Btw. Radeon is working now on the Ultrabook with AMD's SDK but with the small examples CPU is much faster. I suppose this is because of the slow memory transfer. I wonder how HD4000 performs.

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OpenCL on Ubuntu 12.10 with Intel CPU

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