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.
Following the meetings in Taipei and Hsinchu in February2012, the Khronos Group will once again return to Taiwan in early June. Visiting the National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University, Khronos will hold a series of public educational activities and business meetings. In order to further communication and interaction with local Taiwanese businesses, the meetings will be open to the public. The Khronos Group will have a lot of exciting information to discuss and is looking forward to the enthusiastic participation of the Pan-Pacific region.
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Dive headfirst into 3D web application development using WebGL and JavaScript. Each chapter is loaded with code examples and exercises that allow the reader to quickly learn the various concepts associated with 3D web development. The only software that the reader needs to run the examples is an HTML5 enabled modern web browser. No additional tools needed. A practical beginner’s guide with a fast paced but friendly and engaging approach towards 3D web development.
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MulticoreWare has a major presence at AMD Fusion Developer Summit 2012 (AFDS) being held June 11-14 in Bellevue Washington. With twelve presentations and numberous demos at the Experience Zone MulticoreWare is also an AFDS sponsor and Khronos Group member.
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December 2011 saw the kick-off of an ambitious research project called “CARP: Correct and Efficient Accelerator Programming”, which aims to boost the programmability of accelerator hardware, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), by innovating in programming language design and implementation, as well as formal verification techniques. Funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the consortium, which consists of eight partners--including Khronos members ARM, Imperial College London and Rightware--seeks to provide a unified flow for developing correct and efficient accelerator software, thus increasing reliability and energy efficiency of computing systems.
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There will be five courses offered at Siggraph 2012 that relate to Khronos Technologies. Starting on August 5th followed by one course each day, there will be "Introduction to Modern OpenGL", "Virtual Texturing in Software and Hardware", "Beyond Programmable Shading", "GPU Shaders for OpenGL 4.x" and finally on August 9th "Graphics Programming for the Web." See all Khronos related events at Siggraph 2012 on the Khronos Group Siggraph event page.
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Vivante Corporation today announced Vivante GC Cores passed the Khronos Group OpenCL 1.1 Embedded Profile (EP) conformance test suite on Freescale's i.MX 6 platform. The GC Cores use the latest programmable ScalarMorphic architecture to accelerate parallel data workloads on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFLOPS) of computational performance. Applications taking advantage of Vivante cores to significantly speed-up processing includes image processing, computer vision, analytics, augmented reality and gesture-motion tracking.
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Introduction to Modern OpenGL is an introductory course which offers an overview of the complete OpenGL pipeline, introducing all the latest shader stages. Other topics introduced are the shader-based pipeline, and a summary of key graphics concepts: the synthetic-camera model, transformations, viewing, and lighting. The instructors are Edward Angel, University of New Mexico and Dave Shreiner from ARM. Dave Shriener is co-author of the OpenGL® Programming GuideRead More
Kishonti released GLBenchmark 2.5 Beta 3, a cross-platform graphics benchmark for OpenGL ES compliant mobile devices and embedded environments. Kishonti also makes CLBenchmark, a tool for comparing the computational performance of different platforms offering an unbiased way of testing and comparing the performance of implementations of OpenCL 1.1.
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This week, Adrien Plagnol and Frederic Langlade-Bellone did a lecture about WebCL at LyonJS, a monthly event where people talk about Javascript bleeding-edge things.
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HiSilicon and ARM announced that HiSilicon has licensed a range of ARM Mali Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) including the market leading Mali-400 MP GPU and the latest high-performance Mali-T658 GPU. The new licenses will increase the scalability of the GPU performance points that HiSilicon will be able to offer manufacturers of mobile, consumer and home devices. HiSilicon has also licensed the latest ARM Cortex processor technology for use in next generation devices.
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Sketchfab went live recently with new technology making it easy to publish interactive 3D content online. The free service does not require any third-party application installed on either the client side or the server. All Sketchfab needs is for the end-user to be running a WebGL compatible browser.
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Imagination was showing off GPU compute on a cell phone chip at GDC, physics in your pocket. That demo was pretty simple, take a Pandaboard with a TI OMAP 4430, a dual-core ARM A9 CPU and an Imagination SGX540 GPU, and run a cloth simulation on it. Not only could the OpenCL version exploit the GPU to do more balls and sheets than the CPU version, but it saved power while doing so. How much? On one CPU, the simulation took about .68A@5V to run at 14FPS with 100% CPU load. With two A9 cores loaded, the Pandaboard pulled .84A and ran at 24FPS. In OpenCL, CPU load dropped to less than 30%, FPS jumped to 42, and power draw went down to .60A. More than 10% less energy used, 3x the frame rate, and you could run more simulations on the same box if you wanted. Not bad at all.
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Vivante Corporation announced that HiSilicon has expanded its ongoing technology partnership to include additional GC (Graphics and Compute) cores. HiSilicon will continue to integrate these key pieces of visual computing IP into SoC products for mobile and consumer products. Access to the latest Vivante IP cores, give HiSilicon an innovative technology platform based on the latest 3D, CGPU (Composition GPU) and GPGPU APIs. The latest agreement enables HiSilicon to deliver the highest graphics performance in products spanning its entire portfolio.
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Marketing Manager for Intel HD Graphics demos several examples of how the Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2012 supports 3rd generation Intel Core processors on both Intel Processors and HD graphics 4000/2500 for accelerated video processing.
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