ispc/ispc v1.8.2

v1.8.2 (29 May 2015)

on GitHub

An ISPC update with several important stability fixes and an experimental
AVX512 support.

Current level of AVX512 support is targeting the new generation of Xeon Phi
codename Knights Landing. It's implemented in two different ways: as generic and
native target. Generic target is similar to KNC support and requires Intel C/C++
Compiler (15.0 and newer) and is available in regular ISPC build, which is
based on LLVM 3.6.1. For the native AVX512 target, we have a separate ISPC
build, which is based on LLVM trunk (3.7). This build is less stable and has
several known issues. Nevertheless, if you are interested in AVX512 support for
your code, we encourage you to try it and report the bugs. We actively working
with LLVM maintainers to fix all AVX512 bugs, so your feedback is important for
us and will ensure that bugs affecting your code are fixed by LLVM 3.7 release.

Other notable changes and fixes include:

• Broadwell support via --cpu=broadwell.

• Changed cpu naming to accept cpu codenames. Check help for more details.

• --cpu switch disallowed in multi-target mode.

• Alignment of structure fields (in generated header files) is changed to be
  more consistent regardless used C/C++ compiler.

• --dllexport switch is added on Windows to make non-static functions DLL
  export.

• --print-target switch is added to dump details of LLVM target machine.
  This may help you to debug issues with code generation for incorrect target
  (or more likely to ensure that code generation is done right).

• A bug was fixed, which triggered uniform statements to be executed with
  all-off mask under some circumstances.

• The restriction for using some uniform types as return type in multi-target
  mode with targets of different width was relaxed.

Also, if you are using ISPC for code generation for current generation of
Xeon Phi (Knights Corner), the following changes are for you:

• A bunch of stability fixes for KNC.

• A bug, which affects projects with multiple ISPC source files compiled with generic
  target is fixed. As side effect, you may see multiple warnings about unused static
  functions - you need to add -wd177 switch to ICC compiling generic output files.

The release includes LLVM 3.6.1 binaries for Linux, MacOS, Windows and Windows based
cross-compiler for Sony PlayStation4. LLVM 3.5 based experimental Linux binary with
NVPTX support (now supporting also K80).

Native AVX512 support is available in the set of less stable LLVM 3.7 based binaries
for Linux, MacOS and Windows.