The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.
The Khronos Group - Connecting Software to Silicon
The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, dynamic media, computer vision and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics
OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.
OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems
OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.
OpenGL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X: fixed function hardware offering acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X: enables full programmable 3D graphics.
EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.
WebGL is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that brings OpenGL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML, exposed as low-level Document Object Model interfaces. It uses the OpenGL shading language, GLSL ES, and can be cleanly combined with other web content that is layered on top or underneath the 3D content. It is ideally suited for dynamic 3D web applications in the JavaScript programming language, and will be fully integrated in leading web browsers.
WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers
The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL will enable web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.
COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX
glTF - runtime asset format for WebGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL
The "glTF" project aims to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by WebGL, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs. glTF together with COLLADA comprise a standards-based content pipeline for rich 3D web and mobile applications. glTF Specification is a work-in-progress from the COLLADA Working Group; it is not an official Khronos-ratified specification yet. It is incomplete and subject to change. The draft specification and related converters and loaders are available on github.
OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration
OpenVG™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.
OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration
OpenSL ES™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.
OpenMAX IL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
OpenMAX AL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
StreamInput - Cross-platform advanced sensor processing and user interaction
The Khronos StreamInput working group is driving industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to enable applications to discover and use new generation sensors to create sophisticated user interactions. The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling advanced sensors such as depth cameras, touch screens and motion and orientation sensors as well as traditional input devices. StreamInput will provide flexible device discovery to enable an application to select and process high-level semantic input from low-level device capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers while simplifying portable application development. The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.
OpenVX - Hardware acceleration for Computer Vision applications & libraries
Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. The OpenVX working group has been formed to drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms. The OpenVX API can accelerate high-level libraries, such as OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs. OpenVX will explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.
Camera Work Group - CALL for Industry Participation
The Khronos Camera working group is creating an open, royalty-free standard for advanced, low-level control of mobile and embedded cameras and sensors: Mobile and embedded devices are increasingly being equipped with the sensors and processing power for advanced camera-based applications such as computational photography, face and gesture processing, augmented reality and 3D object and scene reconstruction; While Khronos is defining APIs for vision and image processing the industry still lacks a camera API with low-level control of the camera sensor, lens and flash to generate the input image stream needed by cutting-edge computational photography and computer vision; The Camera working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API that provides functionality such as: burst control over sensor, flash and lens, system wide time stamping of sensor samples, multiple sensor control, output format and resolution selection, region of interest extraction, and consistent device and frame metadata.
September 15th, 2009 • Comments •
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Over the past weekend, and very quietly, support for WebGL started to appear in WebKit. If you are interested in seeing what WebGL is all about, watch this video on youtube. If you want to see WebGL it in action, you will need to check out a copy from the WebKit repository, as it is not available yet in the nightly builds. A list of browsers that use WebKit is available on Wikipedia. Some of the more popular browsers that use WebKit include Safari, Chrome, Omniweb, iCab, Android browser and the WebOS browser.
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As the 3D wars heat up, many folks see COLLADA's .dae format as a front runner for Digital Content Creation (DCC). In the Engineering CAD field the STandard for the Exchange of Product model data (STEP) has been declared as a clear winner by some. This article is an attempt to start a conversation on whether or not the COLLADA format is the next 'STEP' for the DCC industry.
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The Khronos Group hosted a series of OpenCL tutorials at the Hotchips 2009 event in August on high performance chips. All of these OpenCL tutorials are now online in the Khronos Developers Library. Included are tutorials from AMD, EA, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, and of course the Khronos Group.
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While OpenCL is very similar in many respects to NVIDIA's CUDA, it adds features to take advantage of other targets; and though it's quite complex, it has the potential to deliver very high performance, and is much easier than trying to map your computation into OpenGL or graphics primitives. So says Michael Wolfe, with over 30 years in both academia and industry on developing compilers, and is now a senior compiler engineer at The Portland Group, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, Inc.
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iPhones Wikipedia has posted a short video from Tap Tap Tap comparing the framerates between an iPhone 3G running OpenGL ES 1.1 and an iPhone 3GS running OpenGL ES 2.0.
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NVIDIA released a new OpenCL Visual Profiler for Windows and Linux for developers. Leveraging the extensive performance instrumentation in NVIDIA's OpenCL drivers and hardware performance signals designed into NVIDIA GPUs, the OpenCL Visual Profiler provides developers with insight into performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization. NVIDIA also released a Best Practices guide for OpenCL.
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The World's Premier Super Computing event, SC09, will hold its 22nd annual event in Portland Oregon this November. This year, more than 275 exhibitors with 40 participating for the first time, have the SC09 organizers expecting a full house at the Oregon Convention Center. One of the first time exhibitors includes the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group will have booth #242 this year and will undoubtedly be extolling the virtues of OpenCL. You will find complete details of tutorials, wokrshops and sessions on the Khronos website.
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Apple announced a minor upgrade to their iPods today with among other things, an upgrade to support OpenGL ES 2.0. Both the popular iPod Touch and the iPhone now supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 reinforces Apples intent to grab a bigger portion of the mobile gaming market.
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OpenTK is an advanced, cross-platform library that provides Mono/.Net OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenAL and OpenCL bindings. The latest version adds support for all OpenGL ES extensions, significantly improves the OpenCL bindings and the ARB_imaging subset of OpenGL. A new compatibility module now allows Tao framework applications to run on OpenTK and improves behavior on broken xlib implementations. Finally, this version adds support for the iPhone platform via the MonoTouch project.
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All NVIDIA CUDA-Enabled GPUs Shipped by Apple Supported under New Operating System. OpenCL on the NVIDIA® CUDA™ architecture enables applications to use the CPU and the GPU together as co-processors. NVIDIA’s integration of the CUDA architecture across its brands and segments enables it to offer Apple users a broad selection of 10 GPU models officially supported by Snow Leopard.
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SEE 2009 is where the Symbian community comes together to share, to create, to network, to learn and to have lots of fun! Khronos Members Qualcomm Nokia, Sony Ericsson and ST Ericsson will be sponsoring this years SEE2009. The event will be held in Earls Court 2 London England from October 27 - 28 2009. Exhibiting this year among others will be Arm, Broadcom, Fujitsu and Imagination Technologies.
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Barracuda is a simple OpenCL Library for Ruby. There’s currently no CUDA support, however, the auther wants to add support for CUDA down the road after figuring out what’s involved. This basic wrapper currently only supports signed integers and floats, with more functionality promised soon.
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Want to know what a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is and why it is important to you? PCWorld has a great getting started primer for folks wanting to know more about GPU's and the things that make them tick. Covering the major players like NVIDIA, AMD / ATI and Intel, and the main API's like DirectX, OpenGL and newcomer OpenCL. Read on to learn about CUDA, ATI stream, SLI and Crossfire and more.
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Arstechnica has written a 23 page in-depth look at Snow Leopard on OS X. Part of that interesting in-depth look are twopages of in-depth coverage on OpenCL. The article is well written and a good informative read.
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DMP has announced a new two day getting start GLSL Programming training course on October 8th and 9th 2009. The OpenGL ES roadmap has been tailored to the diverse needs of the embedded industry and contains two tracks with "1.X" and "2.X" specification roadmaps that will evolve in parallel. The 1.X roadmap will continue to be developed for new-generation fixed function 3D accelerators while the 2.X roadmap will enable emerging programmable 3D pipelines.This course introduce the world of programmable pipeline by explaining basic topics of the GLSL(OpenGL Shading Language) which is a core feature of OpenGL ES 2.x and OpenGL 2.x.
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