Last November Intel introduced oneAPI, described as “a single, unified programming model that aims to simplify development across multiple architectures – such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and accelerators”. This week we take a closer look at oneAPI with the help of Herb Hinstorff, Director of Marketing, Software Developer Products Division at Intel.

Image credit: Intel

Before proceeding to our Q&A session, let’s briefly summarize what oneAPI is about. As described in the Intel’s fact sheet, there are two components of oneAPI: an industry initiative and the Intel beta product. The oneAPI initiative cross-architecture development model is based on industry standards and an open specification, to enable broad ecosystem adoption. The Intel oneAPI beta product is Intel’s implementation of oneAPI that contains the oneAPI specification components with direct programming (Data Parallel C++), API-based programming with a set of performance libraries, advanced analysis and debug tools, and other components. Developers can test their code and workloads in the Intel DevCloud for oneAPI on multiple types of Intel architectures today, including Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Core processors with integrated graphics and Intel FPGAs (Arria, Stratix). The development flow devised for FPGAs – a target traditionally requiring Verilog or VHDL skills, as reminded by Kevin Morris’ article on EEJournal – is described in the following diagram.
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