AN ACCUMUL ATION OF ACRONYMS
F or a long time, users of middle-aged Intel hardware were stuck using the venerable i965 Mesa driver. This caters to a range of hardware, from Broadwater (2006) to the HD and Iris graphics found in some Skylake chips (2015). For older hardware there’s the i915 Mesa driver, not that such hardware had much in the way of 3D capability. Newer, so-called Gen8 graphics and above (from Broadwell through to the latest Xe graphics) is supported by the Iris Gallium3D driver.
Modern graphics cards are fitted with thousands of tiny processors, which is what enables them to compute so many shaders at once. These processors aren’t much use for some compute jobs but for others, where the work can be broken down into lots of units, they’re much more efficient than traditional CPUs.
The i965 (and i915) driver dates back to before the Gallium framework was developed, and throughout last year there were calls to retire it. However, Mesa aren’t in the habit of mass-scale hardware abandonment, so until a replacement was finalised, i965, and other ‘classic’ Mesa drivers were granted a reprieve.
Before Bitcoin ASICs became popular (and drove up the mining difficulty) GPUs used to be the most efficient way to mine them. Password cracking (or recovery) is another application where GPUs come into their own. John the Ripper and Hashcat both have options to use OpenCL to speed things up.