Intel oneAPI 2022 toolkits help developers to improve productivity and accelerate innovation

Intel has released its oneAPI 2022 toolkits, expanding cross-architecture features to provide developers greater utility and architectural choice.

“I am impressed by the breadth of more than 900 technical improvements that the oneAPI software engineering team has done to accelerate development time and performance for critical application workloads across Intel’s client and server CPUs and GPUs. The rich set of oneAPI technologies conforms to key industry standards, with deep technical innovations that enable applications developers to obtain the best possible run-time performance from the cloud to the edge. Multi-language support and cross-architecture performance acceleration are ready today in our oneAPI 2022 release to further enable programmer productivity on Intel platforms,” said Greg Lavender, Intel chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of the Software and Advanced Technology Group.

New capabilities include the world’s first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran, data parallel Python for CPUs and GPUs, advanced accelerator performance modeling and tuning, and performance acceleration for AI and ray tracing visualization workloads. The oneAPI cross-architecture programming model provides developers with tools that aim to improve the productivity and velocity of code development when building cross-architecture applications.

According to an Evans Data survey, 40% of developers target heterogeneous systems that use more than one type of processor, processor core or coprocessor. The pace of innovation is only accelerating with cross-architecture computing driven forward with oneAPI across heterogeneous fabrics of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other accelerators — all of which require software to bind these elements into a complete solution. With oneAPI, developers have the freedom to choose the best hardware for a given solution without the economic and technical burdens of proprietary programming models.

The 2022 Intel oneAPI toolkits deliver performance and productivity through a complete set of advanced tools including compilers, libraries, pre-optimized frameworks, analyzers and debuggers. There are more than 900 new and enhanced features added over the past year that strengthen every tool in the foundational and domain-specific toolkits. They are now available to download or use in the Intel DevCloud for free. Highlights include:

Cross-architecture programming

• Intel created the world’s first unified compiler implementing C++, SYCL and Fortran for CPUs and GPUs utilizing a common LLVM backend.
• Accelerated compute on CPUs and GPUs for Python, today’s most popular programming language.
• The Intel DPC++ Compatibility Tool was improved to automatically migrate 90% to 95% of CUDA code to SYCL/DPC++.

Performance on the latest hardware

• Hardware support – Intel oneAPI Toolkits are optimized to enable advanced features of the latest and upcoming new hardware, including 12th Gen Intel Core processors with AVX-VNNI, Next Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids with Intel Advanced Matrix Extension (Intel AMX), and upcoming Xe client and data center GPUs.

AI performance optimizations

• Deep learning framework performance is accelerated up to 10 times over earlier versions with the latest Intel Optimization for TensorFlow and Intel Optimization for PyTorch.
• New Intel Extension for Scikit-learn speeds up machine learning algorithms more than 100 times on Intel CPUs over the stock open source version.
• Introduced Intel Neural Compressor to achieve increased inference performance through post-training optimization techniques across multiple deep learning frameworks.

Advanced tools for development productivity

• Expert performance analysis for CPUs and accelerators – Intel VTune Profiler’s flame graph display helps improve the ability to visualize performance hot spots. Intel Advisor’s accelerator performance modeling allows developers to estimate performance benefits of offloading to a GPU before making code changes.
• Advanced ray tracing – New features including cone telemetry, auxiliary feature denoising and FP16 support provide more robust shapes and shorten rendering times, improving overall rendering performance. Support for upcoming Intel Xe GPUs as well as real-time denoising further improve industry-leading, final frame, production-quality rendering.
• Expanded development environment support including deeper Microsoft Visual Studio Code integration, support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2022, and Microsoft WSL2 for Linux development on Windows.