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[clamport]

I've heard a lot about the deprecation of CAL, and other users have speculated that this also entails the deprecation of IL. Is AMD planning on switching over to LLVM fully at some point, or will IL remain a usable language with the restriction it must be used via OpenCL?

Just looking for a little bit of official guidance.

Thanks,

Chris

[MicahVillmow]

AMD has used OpenCL for its compiler since OpenCL development began. There are unofficial ways to use IL with OpenCL, but nothing that is officially supported.

[clamport]

I guess this leads me to two more questions, if I may.

For those who like to work at a more in depth level, is there any replacement for IL in the works (ie LLVM)?

Second question is, will IL ever be truly deprecated? Is IL actually "going away" or is it just going to be hidden by LLVM?

There are things that we don't have access to, at least according to the OpenCL specification, that we could do in IL. If I recall, in IL it was possible to sample unsigned short values. According to the OpenCL spec,

The read_image{i|ui} calls support a nearest filter only. The filter_mode specified in sampler must be set to CLK_FILTER_NEAREST; otherwise the values returned are undefined.

Aside from software sampling, is there a way in OpenCL to get around this?

Sorry for all the noise,

Regards,

Chris

[MicahVillmow · Accepted solution]

The public interface for IL compilation was CAL, that is deprecated.

AMD has Open Sourced its AMDIL code generator, so you can actually target AMDIL from any language via LLVM, but this is an unsupported path.

You can also retrieve IL from our OpenCL binaries, which are just ELF containers.

However, AMDIL will eventually go away for OpenCL, AMD has announced the HSA foundation and the HSA IL language, and that is the successor to AMDIL. AMDIL is too graphics centric of a language to fully support compute based languages.

[clamport]

Last question, I promise...

When can we get access to HSA IL?

[MicahVillmow]

You need to ask the HSA foundation that question.

http://hsafoundation.com/