Abandoned by IBM. Since end 2012 the drivers stopped working – in other words: never left beta-stage.

While not actively developed anymore, the SDK gives good performance on POWER-processors. Officially it works with server-processors only, but it got best known when clusters of playstations were built. The processor in the PS3 can do up to 230 GFLOPS, which is much more than the fastest Intel processor.

Official support is for Power6, Power7 and PowerXCell 8i. Unofficially it works on a PS3, but you need to have Linux running on it.

The SDK

Start looking around in the OpenCL lounge. There you’ll find the link to the SDK (registration needed).

LLVM to the rescue

IBM took the dive into LLVM (including slides and video). This resulted in extending Portable OpenCL to POWER and other IBM architectures. Version 0.7 now has added support for:

  • PowerPC 64 support (tested on Cell/Debian Sid/PS3).
  • PowerPC 32 support (tested on Cell/Debian Sid/PS3).
  • Beginning of Cell SPU support (very experimental!).

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