Yesterday, Intel has finally coughed up it's OpenCL SDK for linux and windows.
Not that it's such a big deal, because they only provide the hardware to back OpenCL performance up for enterprises, in the form of the Xeon Phi. It does also work though for Intel Graphics, although it's pretty much functionally limited to Intel HD5000 graphics and Iris on desktop and laptop systems.
Beignet has been in development for a really long time now, and multiple related mergers have taken place in the linux kernel.
Does this mean that finally, green light has been given to AMD to move forward with HSA? We'll see, but I think Intel wants AMD to wait for Broadwell, which should be coming out in November this year (which makes the whole Haswell Refresh exercise even more pathetic by the way).
It does mean that the new b/h/x chipsets should provide the proper functionality for hybrid computing on Intel platforms also (some 5 years after AMD, even though it's pretty much a linux-only thing on AMD, on windows it never picked up at all, guess windows-users don't compute lol). Whether Intel will continue blocking the z-chipsets from advanced features, is still not clear, and since Intel is not a clear communicator on these things, we'll have to see what Broadwell brings to the table in that respect.
What are the practical implementations? For a lot of users, it will be Spreadsheet calculations and analysis acceleration in LibreOffice (not available on MS-Office, nor on LibreOffice for Windows). Many business machines do not have a dedicated graphics card, but use Intel iGPU's, and this type of application is one of the most frequently used all over the world. For other users, it will provide a marginal acceleration in photo editing on linux (not available on Windows, popular photo editors like Lightroom on Windows don't use any acceleration), or video editing software (on linux and windows), but also 3D rendering (also especially on linux, most 3D rendering on windows still is locked down to cuda acceleration). Will it provide a noticeable acceleration in video renderings? Probably not, unless the Xeon Phi is used, because the Intel iGPU's have very limited hardware resources. Another big field of application is acceleration of all kinds of browser applications. Now that the Intel SDK is available next to the AMD SDK's (which have been available for years now), developers can finally optimize browser applications for both platforms, which means that more will become possible. But there are many other fields of application, and the net result will be that more will become possible than is possible now.