WebCL: New hardware power for Web apps?
Hardware acceleration is all the rage right now among browser makers: it can speed up everything from animating graphics to laying out all the elements of a Web page. Tapping directly into the hardware at a low level not only speeds things up, it saves precious battery power, too. If you aren't sure what WebCL is all about yet, hop over to cnet where they have written up a well rounded review of this latest Khronos Group API.
Samsung’s WebCL Prototype for WebKit
Samsung announced the release of "WebCL for WebKit" a prototype of a proposed WebCL specification that is being defined by The Khronos Group. WebCL allows JavaScript to run computations on the GPU (or any other OpenCL-enabled computing processors). Samsung released a video, in which WebCL is used for computing N-body gravitational interactions and WebGL is used for 3D rendering. For comparison, the same computations are also done in pure JavaScript. WebCL is shown to give performance increases of up to 100x (for these applications on the test platform).
Nokia Research releases WebCL prototype
The WebCL extension provides OpenCL bindings for JavaScript, allowing web developers to tap into the massively parallel computational resources of modern GPUs and multicore CPUs. The extension is currently available for Firefox 4 on Windows and Linux. Further development will take place in open source, and in cooperation with the Khronos WebCL working group.
2011 GDC Presentation slides from Khronos DevU now online
Khronos has posted slide presentations from GDC 2011 online. Included in the DevU presentations are COLLADA, Mobile, OpenCL, OpenVG and WebGL.
WebGL and COLLADA feedback from around the web
Our announcements yesterday about WebGL and COLLADA, were at the very least, significant. Feedback from around the web has been really great, just to name a few:
- cnet discuss' Microsoft and Adobe molehill in WebGL 1.0 is done. Where's Microsoft?
- On the facebook developer blog, you can see WebGL benchmark results from their JSGameBench
- See past and present of 3D on the web with PC Magazine, from VRML to WebGL
- Khronos didn't stop to celebrate WebGL, and pushed on to WebCL says TechConnect Magazine
- ...last but certainly far from least, Learning WebGL does a short take on all the news WebGL specification 1.0 is final — and also, WebCL?
WebCL speculations around the net
ConceivablyTech posted a good review of the WebGL 1.0 Spec release news and followed it up with their own speculation on WebCL. "Enabled in a browser, WebCL could open an entirely new world for cloud applications at much higher performance levels. Khronos mentioned image and video processing as well as advanced physics for web games that could come alive through WebCL."