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.
Chapters - Community driven regional meetup groups
Chapters host all kinds of Khronos technology-related events, from casual meet ups and socials to hack fests, fundraisers, guest lectures, community service and educational events.
David Kanter at Real World Technologies was written an in-depth introduction to OpenCL. Starting with the general history of OpenCL, David covers the execution and memory model, and finished up with a good recap and glossary. An excellent read for the beginner to intermediate OpenCL developer.
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Firefox 7 has just been released. Mozilla has identified and patched several vulnerabilities with regards to WebGL including a critical security vulnerabilities.
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When it comes to high-performance computing applications, OpenMP has long been the standard open-source API for the job. However, OpenCL is now emerging as a new challenger in the HPC space. According to Evans' Data Corp., OpenCL is now the second most popular HPC tool with almost 28% of developers using OpenCL, ahead of Intel's Threading Building Blocks (Source: AMD slideset). Evans also shows OpenCL adoption has increased since 2009. AMD has decided to step up its game by releasing optimization and development tools that fill in the gaps it sees in the OpenCL ecosystem.
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Users of Apples recently released Final Cut Pro X will appreciate the most recent upgrade. FCP now includes OpenCL support for exporting your videos. According to OnlineVideo.net "I tested a few simple test projects, and saw some profound speed increases, particularly with an AVCHD clip with a Gaussian Noise effect applied. Not all producers will see these kind of benefits, but it’s nice to see OpenCL start to pay some real benefits."
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While watching the season premiere of Terra Nova the other night, we were surprised to see a Google Chrome commercial. We were even more surprised to hear Google prominently announce WebGL in the commercial, not once but twice. We hope you will enjoy the commercial as much as we did.
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The new Intel® OpenCL SDK 1.5 makes it easy for you to design, build, debug, and profile OpenCL applications running on the CPU device.
Among the new features in this release is a beta OpenCL kernel debugger, a support for OpenCL profiling with Intel® GPA 4.2, seamless utilization of the Intel® AVX instruction set through the Implicit CPU Vectorization Module, and offline compiler support for Linux.
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DMP is proud to announce two all new OpenGL ES programming training courses. OpenGL ES programming training I and II will run November 10-11 and November 24 - 25, 2011. Complete details are available online for the Training I and Training II courses in english, and in Japanese.
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Smith Micro Software has announced the official release of Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012. New Features include: Subsurface Scattering; Rendering Performance Improvements; Vertex Weight Map Rigging Support; 64-Bit Application and FireFly Render Engine; Vertex Weight Map Editing Tool Suite; and Updated PoserFusion plugins and COLLADA support.
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After the last incredibly successful San Francisco WebGL Developers Meetup, another has been setup for September 29th at 7PM. This month's San Francisco WebGL Meetup features SRI International's Kuda, an advanced JavaScript library and World Editor that enables web developers to quickly build interactive 3D web solutions. There is only room for about 30 people, so be sure to get your spot early.
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Rightware launched the Basemark™ OS for Android, the latest addition to company’s roster of benchmark products. The graphic tests featured in Basemark OS for Android allow accurate measurement of 2D imaging, image scaling, JPEG, PNG and GIF encoding and decoding, and a compelling 3D test set with fillrate, polycount, lighting, texturing and rendering tests, and a 3D game test based on OpenGL ES.
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Intel updated their Sandy Bridge drivers at IDF. Intel has refreshed its generic Sandy Bridge graphics driver to version 15.22.50.2509 for 32-bit Windows Vista and 7 and version 15.22.50.64.2209 for 64-bit Windows Vista and 7. some of the fixes include are WebGL rendering problems in Firefox and Chrome, and various OpenGL enhancements. Details are available on the online Intel PDF.
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AMD announced that it has created drivers to enable support for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system on AMD-based tablets, netbooks, PCs and servers. AMD technology offers a compelling platform for the forthcoming Windows 8, with native support for Microsoft DirectX 11, C++ AMP, OpenCL and Accelerated HTML5, as well as planned support of DirectX 11.1 features.
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The new AMD FirePro SDI-Link and V7900 SDI Professional Graphics Card address the market for real-time, GPU-accelerated post production and broadcast pipelines requiring Serial Digital Interface (SDI) input and output. AMD FirePro SDI-Link was announced with support from the premier players in the broadcast technology market: AJA, Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design, DELTACAST, DVS and Matrox. "Integrators in the broadcast and real-time video production market can now benefit from the latest advances in GPU acceleration," said Sandeep Gupte, general manager of professional graphics at AMD. Both cards offer extensive support for OpenCL 1.1 and OpenGL 4.2.
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At the International Broadcasting Convention 2011NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA GPUDirect for Video. This technology enables application developers to deliver higher quality, more realistic on-air graphics -- or take faster advantage of the parallel processing power of the GPU for image processing. This is done by permitting industry-standard video I/O devices to communicate directly with NVIDIA professional Quadro and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) at ultra-low latency. Nick Rashby, President, AJA Video Systems says "this will allow developers whose apps support AJA video I/O products to take better advantage of the power of NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs, resulting in low-latency access for both graphics compositing and general purpose processing using CUDA or OpenCL, with all the I/O and performance they depend on from AJA."
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The complete COLLADA BOF video set is now online. Presentations cover Remi Arnaud of Screampoint, Marco Tillmann, Nathan Letwory, Uli Klumpp from Smith Micro and Daniel Meiwes from Oregon State University.
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