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.
Ars Technica has a three part series exploring major trends that will influence the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC ) market over the next five to ten years. Including CPU to SoC and covering most of the large players in the field, this is a great read to get your Friday off to a good start.
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ARM has submitted the Mali-T604 GPU for OpenGL ES 3.0 conformance with Khronos. The Mali-T604 is existing silicon already shipping in a range of market leading devices, including the Samsung Chromebook, Google Nexus 10 and the recently announced Samsung F8000 LED TV. This submission helps to enable the consistent and reliable solutions and standards the industry needs.
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Mesa 3D is a free and opensource implementation of OpenGL. Version 9.1 brings support for Intel's Haswell processors. Radeon HD 2000 to 6000 series driver now supports OpenGL 3.1 core profile. Multisample anti-aliasing support on Radeon X1000 series was also added. OpenGL ES 3.0 is now supported on Intel HD Graphics 2000, 2500, 3000, and 4000. The new version also includes basic components to support OpenGL 3.2 and 3.3.
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How to write portable WebGL comes from the same author as Why you should use WebGL. When programming WebGL you need to be careful to make it portable. This post explains how to make WebGL portable across many devices, what to look out for and techniques to work around the limitations you face.
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The PowerVR G6100 is the latest addition to the highly efficient Series6 family of graphics IP cores, making it the smallest member of the "Rogue" area-optimized GPUs to date. A single core, single cluster GPU, it will enable mass-market adoption of OpenGL ES 3.0 on a wide range of computing platforms. Products supporting the latest APIs from Khronos will become a significant and growing part of a billion unit market by 2014. PowerVR Series6 is one of the first GPU architectures to achieve full conformance for OpenGL ES 3.0. Launched at MWC in Barcelona, the PowerVR G6100 is the smallest and most efficient GPU available on the market that can handle both graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.0 and DirectX9 Level 3 as well as GPU compute applications accelerated through OpenCL, Renderscript Compute or Filterscript.
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Anthony Liot works for ACTISKU, creator of 3D real-time marketing solutions. He works with the 3D engine Unigine. Passionate in his search for a way to bring great 3D graphics with no plug-in to the Web, Anthony worked with Mozilla to make this happen.
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A fast, lightweight 2D library that works across all devices, both mobile and desktop. The pixi renderer allows everyone to enjoy the power of hardware acceleration without prior knowledge of WebGL.
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Imagination’s PowerVR Series6 GPU technologies have now achieved full conformance with the latest version of OpenGL ES, marking another major milestone for this family of efficient, low power GPU IP cores which have been among the first OpenGL ES 3.0-conformant graphics cores to ship in consumer products. OpenGL ES 3.0 is the first update to OpenGL ES since 2004, bringing new features to the mobile standard that were previously only available on the desktop-oriented OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2. Khronos has kept backwards compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 but introduced new capabilities within the rendering pipeline, extended the list of texture formats, updated the GLSL ES shading language, and enhanced texturing functionality and efficiency, among other enhancements.
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On February 13, 2013, Qualcomm mobile processors were one of the first to receive certification by the Khronos Group for conformance with the OpenGL ES 3.0 specifications. This is the latest version of the most widely used high-level, cross-platform graphics API for games and sophisticated graphics programming. Upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 600 and 800 processors with the latest industry leading Adreno™ 300 series GPUs will support OpenGL ES 3.0.
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All topics related to OpenCL are of interest, including OpenCL applications from any domain (e.g., scientific computing, video games, computer graphics, multimedia, information retrieval, optimization, text processing, data mining, finance, signal and image processing and numerical solvers), OpenCL performance analysis and modeling, OpenCL performance and correctness tools and proposed OpenCL extensions.
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Intel HD 2500/4000 graphics on "Ivy Bridge" processors now officially support OpenGL ES 3.0 per the Khronos specification. Intel received early word that their conformance results have been certified.
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Mobica has joined the Khronos Group. Mobica is a British company focused on providing solutions to consumer electronics, automotive and industrial markets, with R&D centres in the UK, Poland and California. "We’re delighted to join the Khronos family and look forward to sharing our extensive experience in low-level graphics software" said Jim Carroll, CTO of Mobica. "We’re pleased to welcome Mobica to the Khronos Group and the benefits their multimedia and graphics expertise will bring to the Khronos community" said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.
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Intel has now submitted their OpenGL ES 3.0 results to the Khronos Group for validation with Ivy Bridge hardware and the Mesa 9.1 branch in hopes of being one of the first driver implementations to be officially OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant. Product is based on a published Khronos Specification, and is expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.
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NME 3.5.5 has been released with WebGL support. NME is a framework for building games and applications for mobile, desktop and web platforms. OpenGLView was introduced in NME 3.5, and support for HTML5, using WebGL has now been added. The new “HerokuShaders” sample is a great cross-platform illustration of GLSL shaders at work. The sample will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BlackBerry and HTML5, and will run on other mobile platforms once GLES2 support is official.
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