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.

Khronos to Create New Camera Control Open Standard API

Call for industry participation to develop specification for advanced control of mobile and embedded cameras and sensors for leading-edge photography and vision apps; Work group meetings start June 2013; Camera BOF at SIGGRAPH 2013

May 21st, 2013 – The Khronos™ Group today announced a new initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for advanced, low-level control of mobile and embedded cameras and sensors.  In response to requests and proposals from members, Khronos has created a Camera working group to develop a hardware control API using the proven Khronos development process.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The Camera working group will commence work during June 2013.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

“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,” said Mikael Bourges-Sevenier, director of high performance imaging at Aptina Imaging and chair pro tem for the Camera working group.  “Khronos has successfully created APIs to accelerate image and vision processing; but 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 Khronos 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.  More background on the Camera working group goals are here: http://www.khronos.org/camera.

“This new Camera Control API will play a vital role in the Khronos ecosystem and we invite any company with an interest or expertise in mobile and embedded cameras, sensors and image processing to join Khronos to help build an enabling standard that can be broadly adopted to drive and broaden market opportunities,” said Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA and president of the Khronos Group.  “This working group has been catalyzed by listening to the application developer community wanting to push back the limits of mobile vision processing.  Khronos is the ideal forum to define this low-level, foundational hardware control API that needs deep insights into silicon and sensor design.”

Camera BOF “Birds of a Feather Session” at SIGGRAPH 2013, Anaheim, July 23rd 2013
  Members of the press and industry are invited to an overview and discussion of the challenges and goals of the newly formed Camera working group at SIGGRAPH, July 2013 in Anaheim.  The BOF has been requested for 3:30-4:30pm, Tuesday, July 23rd. More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2013

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, DevU, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC, OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Learning WebGL Appoints Tony Parisi Editor-in-Chief

Leading 3D Educational Site to Expand Content and Format

April 10, 2013 – Learning WebGL™, a leading site for learning browser-based 3D programming, today announced that it has appointed Tony Parisi as Editor-in-Chief. Mr. Parisi, an entrepreneur, author and technology innovator, is best known for co-creating the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), the original standard for 3D graphics on the web. For the past two years Mr. Parisi has been writing and lecturing on developing applications in WebGL™, the 3D JavaScript API standard developed by the Khronos Group™ and supported in major desktop and mobile browsers.

"WebGL has brought real-time, hardware-accelerated 3D rendering capability to nearly every desktop and mobile web browser on the planet, opening up incredible possibilities for new kinds of connected visual applications." said Mr. Parisi. "Now that WebGL is stable and widely implemented, our job is to teach developers how to use it. Learning WebGL is a premier site and often the first place developers go to learn about this exciting new technology."

“Khronos Group is proud to see this vital Web standard being taught and promoted by industry expert Tony Parisi,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. “Khronos is committed not only to evolving the functionality of WebGL, but also to enabling instructors and experts within the larger HTML5 standards community to ensure a thriving ecosystem of tool and application developers.”

Learning WebGL also announced it has appointed the site’s creator, Giles Thomas, as Editor Emeritus, in recognition for his pioneering efforts developing an invaluable educational destination for WebGL. "I started Learning WebGL as a way of sharing my experiences as I learned the platform, both the details of the technology and the groundbreaking work of other developers," said Mr. Thomas. "I’ve been delighted to see such a strong community gather around it, and it’s great to see that Tony, with his strong background in 3D graphics on the web, has been able to come forward to steward it for the future."

Learning WebGL plans to expand the focus of the site beyond tutorial content and weekly news to include additional contributors and featured articles. Specific details of the new site content are to be announced.

About Learning WebGL
Learning WebGL is a web site for learning browser-based 3D programming with the WebGL API. Created in 2009, Learning WebGL has become a premier destination for 3D developers, featuring extensive tutorial content and "WebGL Around the Net," a weekly roundup of WebGL content, technologies and applications.

About Tony Parisi
Tony Parisi is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and continues to innovate in 3D technology. Tony is the organizer of the San Francisco WebGL Meetup, a founder of the Rest3D working group, and a member of the Khronos COLLADA working group creating glTF, the new file format standard for 3D web and mobile applications. Tony is also the author of O’Reilly Media’s first authoritative book on WebGL, WebGL Up and Running (2012), and the upcoming Programming 3D Applications in HTML5 and WebGL (O’Reilly 2013). Read Tony’s blog at www.tonyparisi.com.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

Khronos COLLADA now recognized as ISO Standard

Significant upgrades to OpenCOLLADA open source importer/exporter; New glTF project to streamline content delivery from COLLADA to OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL

March 27th, 2013 – The Khronos™ Group today announces that COLLADA™ 1.5.0 has been published as an official ISO standard to provide a reliable, long-term international standard for 3D asset authoring and interchange.  ISO SC4 TC184 has published ISO/PAS 17506 “… to enable developers to create tools to process COLLADA resources to import to or export from digital content creation (DCC) applications, 3D interactive applications and tool chains, prototyping tools and real-time visualization applications.”  More information can be found online here.

In addition, the COLLADA working group announces that it has delivered on key objectives agreed with the COLLADA community over the last year.  By working with NetAllied, the OpenCOLLADA open-source importer/exporter has been significantly upgraded to provide proven, robust operation and hosted on GitHub for free and easy adoption by tools vendors and the COLLADA community.  The OpenCOLLADA SDK offers direct write and parsing import capabilities, and robust support for full COLLADA import/export, which is superior to many commercial solutions. OpenCOLLADA is available under the MIT license and Khronos encourages its free-of-charge integration in commercial and proprietary tools. OpenCOLLADA can be found here.

Further, today the COLLADA Working Group announces the formation of the new “glTF” project to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by OpenGL®, OpenGL ES or WebGL™ APIs. glTF™ together with COLLADA comprise a standards-based content pipeline for rich 3D web and mobile applications.  Khronos will make drafts of the glTF file format publicly available during development to enable feedback and integration of requirements from the wider industry and will also create a sample open source COLLADA to glTF convertor.  More information on glTF is available here.

Finally, Khronos announces that the full COLLADA Test Suite is now also ported to GitHub and is free to use to exhaustively test the quality of any COLLADA importer/exporter: details here with a full tutorial on how to use the test suite here.

“The 3D community should have reliable open standard formats to use when access to their assets is at stake.  COLLADA has always provided the guarantee of continuity, which is now significantly enhanced with an ISO endorsement,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA.  “But the foundation for any asset format is reliability, and now with the upgraded OpenCOLLADA importer/exporter and the full COLLADA Test Suite freely available on GitHub everyone can have access to high-quality, cross-platform asset exchange.”

About glTF
Key requirements driving the development of glTF are: to match WebGL processing requirements, including using typed arrays within a browser; to use JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to be cross-platform and web-friendly; and to hold geometry and texture assets in binary blobs for future expandability of asset types that may include streaming and compression.  glTF is also intended to create market opportunities for run-time optimized 3D asset stores and repositories.

“glTF is highly complementary to COLLADA and puts another vital piece of the 3D ecosystem in place – enabling easy transmission of 3D assets from COLLADA for efficient processing in millions of OpenGL-enabled browsers, mobiles and desktops,” said Fabrice Robinet, COLLADA Working Group Chair.  “By standardizing a run-time format, we open the opportunity of widespread, re-usable content to be efficiently processed at low power and high performance, with streaming and compression of 3D assets in the future.”

Come to the San Francisco COLLADA Meetup!

 
• When: Wednesday March 27th at 3:30-5:30PM
 
• Where: Hilton Hotel, 333 O’Farrell St, Tower 1, Presidential Suite – #1-4178
 
• What: Learn more about these announcements, see the latest demos, give your input and feedback to COLLADA working group members and network with the COLLADA and WebGL communities!  Refreshments served! Spaces are limited – please sign-up here.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™, glTF™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, DevU, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC, OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

WebGL Momentum Creating the Industry’s most Secure and Portable 3D Platform

Multiple WebGL implementations now fully conformant on desktop and mobile;
WebGL 1.0.2 being ratified for stricter behavior and functionality extensions

March 27th, 2013 – The Khronos™ Group today announces that multiple WebGL™ 1.0.1 implementations are now fully conformant on a range of desktop and mobile platforms – with many more to follow. In addition, the WebGL 1.0.2 specification and a set of extensions have been submitted for ratification and are expected to be formally released in April 2013. The browser and GPU communities have been working diligently in the WebGL working group to resolve GPU driver issues and tighten the WebGL specification by precisely defining behaviors to provide a trusted and reliable platform that provides portability for 3D content within HTML5 browsers across diverse platforms. The latest information on the WebGL specification is here.

Among the first WebGL 1.0.1 implementations submitted for approval as being fully conformant are both Google Chrome 25 and Firefox 19 on Windows, Mac and Linux and a WebGL-enhanced Android browser for Tegra based platforms from NVIDIA.

“I want to thank in particular all of the major GPU vendors on desktop platforms, including AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, the developers of the Mesa 3D graphics library, the Chrome team at Google, Mozilla Corporation and Apple for their hard work and persistence in fixing bugs in order to ensure consistent operation of the WebGL, and OpenGL®, APIs across operating systems and GPUs. This is a major milestone in bringing the power of the GPU to the Web,” said Ken Russell of Google and WebGL Working group chair.

The WebGL 1.0.2 specification and conformance tests significantly tighten specified behavior for improved portability and testability:

• adds many clarifications for specification behavioral precision - principally thanks to Mozilla;
• mandates support for certain combinations of framebuffer formats, to ease developer adoption;
• clarifies interactions with the encompassing HTML5 platform, including the browser compositor and high-DPI displays;
• dramatically increases the number of conformance tests to roughly 21,000 to improve both the breadth and depth of test coverage - thanks principally to work by Gregg Tavares at Google and the OpenGL ES working group.

In addition, the WebGL working group has submitted a number of optional extensions for ratification that are also expected to be released in April:

• JavaScript-level debugging of WebGL API calls and shaders;
• a query to ensure lost context events are handled correctly – such as when a mobile device is powered off when WebGL is executing;
• additional 3D functionality from the OpenGL ES 2.0 ecosystem such as anisotropic filtering, standard derivatives and vertex array objects.

“The close cooperation between browser and silicon vendors to ensure the GPU is being reliably and securely exposed to the Web is ongoing proof that Khronos is a highly productive forum to evolve this vital Web standard,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. “Khronos remains committed, not only to evolve the functionality of WebGL to enable Web developers to use rapidly growing capabilities of mobile GPUs, but also to continue to work as a good citizen within the larger HTML5 standards community.”

Come to the San Francisco WebGL Meetup!

• When: Thursday March 28th at 6:30PM
• Where: Hilton Hotel, 333 O’Farrell St, Tower 1, Presidential Suite – #1-4178
• What: Learn more about these announcements and see the latest demos, give your input and feedback to WebGL working group members and network with the WebGL community! Refreshments served! Spaces are limited – please sign-up.
  

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, WebCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, DevU, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC, OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

CogniVue Endorses Open Standard for Computer Vision by Joining the Khronos Group

CogniVue® Corporation announces joining the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member.

(PRWEB) March 19, 2013–As part of its ongoing enablement of embedded vision, CogniVue® Corporation announces joining the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member. CogniVue is strategically focused on aligning its Image Cognition Processor (ICP) core IP products with OpenCL™. OpenCL is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of heterogeneous processors in a variety of applications. CogniVue’s ICP technology for embedded vision enables more than 10x the vision processing performance per area per power versus conventional processor solutions. By combining ICP technology with OpenCL-ES, CogniVue brings the open platform advantages of OpenCL to small form factor, low power vision applications.

“CogniVue’s ICP technology is based on APEX, CogniVue’s innovative massively parallel SIMD-MIMD processing architecture, specifically geared to drive new levels of vision performance per area per power. We plan to make our APEX vision-processing core IP and vision algorithm toolkits seamlessly available to developers already working in OpenCL,” commented Simon Morris, CEO of CogniVue. Ray Cornyn, VP Automotive at Freescale added, “As a licensee of APEX technology for automotive vision processing we are pleased to see CogniVue’s commitment to OpenCL.”

“CogniVue using OpenCL for their Image Cognition Processor IP products is another significant indication of the growing penetration of OpenCL in embedded applications,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president and OpenCL working group chair. “The goal of OpenCL is to allow cross-platform parallel programming, and we are delighted that CogniVue’s APEX architecture is yet another parallel processing platform that will be compatible with the OpenCL standard.”

About CogniVue Corporation
CogniVue is a world leading innovator of Image Cognition Processor (ICP) core IP and software for embedded vision systems. CogniVue’s ICP technology and comprehensive software offering provide advanced technology for companies developing deeply embedded vision applications for automotive, retail, consumer and security markets. The core technology is built on its proprietary, flexible, massively-parallel APEX™ vision processor engine combined with comprehensive image library, vision algorithm tool kit and development tools. APEX provides best performance, per area (mm2), per power (mWatt) for vision systems, providing companies with the ability to develop previously implausible, innovative vision products implemented in the smallest smart camera modules in the world. Founded in 2005, CogniVue is a privately held company headquartered in Ottawa-Gatineau, Canada and was recently recognized by the EE Times as among the globe’s ‘Silicon 60’ of emerging start-ups. For more information, please visit www.cognivue.com.

About Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a not for profit, member-funded consortium focused on the creation of royalty-free open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media 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. For more information, please visit www.khronos.org.

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Any product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks featured or referred to above are the property of their respective trademark holders.

LEAP 2013 Conference to Showcase the Latest Advances in the Application of Parallel Computing Technology on Low-Energy Mobile CPU/GPU, FPGA and Embedded Devices

Keynotes from ARM and Khronos to set the stage for world-class knowledge transfer around parallel computing on low-energy platforms

LONDON, England – 11th Mar 2013, LEAP, the first conference and networking event focused exclusively on the use of parallel computing technology on low-energy devices, today announced keynote speakers from Khronos and ARM will present at the conference and that pre-registration is now open for delegates.  LEAP 2013 takes place in London on May 21st – 22nd.

Low-Energy parallel computing is a new space, with new technologies, new applications, new opportunities and new issues to discuss. LEAP 2013 will give developers, researchers, engineers and technology managers the vital knowledge they need to understand, assess and exploit the benefits of using low-energy parallel computing technology across a broad range of low-power platforms, including; mobiles, tablets and all manner of embedded consumer, medical and industrial devices.

For more information visit: www.leapconf.com or follow us @LEAPconf

Modern CPU and GPU architectures endorse parallelism as the route to achieve more performance and efficiency and to make new kinds of applications a reality on low-power platforms.” said Neil Trevett, president Khronos Group, OpenCL Chair and VP Mobile Content at NVIDIA and LEAP keynote speaker. “The evolution of OpenCL, Renderscript, CUDA and other APIs is helping to meet the growing demand for more accessible GFLOPS/mW. LEAP provides an ideal and timely opportunity for developers and suppliers to get together to learn from each other.

“Parallel compute is a fundamental enabler for enhanced user experiences and increased energy efficiency in mobile and consumer devices.” said Tim Lewis, co-organiser of LEAP. “It’s great to have keynotes from both Neil and Roberto Mijat of ARM to set the stage and help stimulate the discussion around exploiting this next evolution in mobile and low-energy computing.”

LEAP 2013 will include keynotes, technical and business presentations, research posters and workshops and will also provide networking opportunities and an “emerging solutions” forum to allow innovative startups to showcase new technologies.

LEAP provides a unique forum to bring together like-minded people who wish to explore the opportunities and challenges of this emerging technology to solve real-world problems” said Vincent Hendriksen of StreamComputing. “In addition to the world class keynotes and speakers I’m particularly excited about the networking opportunities that the event will provide.

Background

In addition to the many scientific, academic, industrial and financial use cases for high-performance computing, there is a wide variety of applications where the use of parallel programming techniques on low-energy CPUs, GPU and FPGAs can bring great benefits. Examples include: computational photography and computer vision, multimedia processing, stream data processing (deep packet inspection, antivirus, encryption, compression, and data analytics), UIs, voice and gesture recognition, physics, AI, ray tracing, modelling, augmented reality and many, many more.

About LEAP

LEAP 2013 is the place to learn about and share the latest advances in the use of high-performance parallel computing technology and on low-power mobile CPU, GPU and FPGA devices. LEAP provides a unique forum to bring together like-minded people who wish to explore the opportunities and challenges of this emerging technology to solve real-world problems.

 

Khronos Releases Significant OpenCL 1.2 Specification Update

Khronos Releases Significant OpenCL 1.2 Specification Update

New OpenCL extensions expand functionality for key use cases, including
  a robust platform for heterogeneous parallel computation in a web browser;
  Find out more about OpenCL at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore

November 30th, 2012 – Singapore, SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of an update to the OpenCL™ 1.2 specification, the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors.  This backwards compatible version updates the core OpenCL 1.2 specification with bug fixes and clarifications and defines additional optional extensions for enhanced performance, functionality and robustness for parallel programming on a wide variety of platforms.  Optional extensions are not required to be supported by a conformant OpenCL implementation, but are expected to be widely available; they define functionality that is likely to move into the required feature set in a future revision of the OpenCL specification.  The updated OpenCL 1.2 specifications, together with online reference pages and reference cards are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The OpenCL working group continues to listen closely to the demands of the developer community, and this update provides a timely increase in functionality and reliability of code ported across vendor implementations,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.  “The new extensions enable early access to functionality for key use cases, including security capabilities for implementations of WebCL that enable access to OpenCL within a browser.”

The new OpenCL 1.2 extensions provide enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance through updates and additions including:

 
• enabling an OpenCL image to be created from a OpenGL multi-sampled texture that is designed for multi-sampled anti-aliasing using color or depth, providing more flexibility in interoperating 3D graphics and compute;
 
• creating 2D images from an OpenCL buffer to enable flexibility in which memory structures are processed using the advanced properties of OpenCL images;
 
• providing security features for WebCL implementations layered over OpenCL including: the ability to initialize local and private memory before a kernel begins execution, and a new query and API to terminate an OpenCL context to ensure a long running kernel does not affect system stability;
 
• loading an OpenCL program object from a Standard Portable Intermediate Representation (SPIR) instance. SPIR is a vendor neutral non-source representation for OpenCL C programs that enables increased tool chain flexibility and avoids the need to ship kernel source in commercial applications.
   

“ARM sees GPU Compute functionality as a fundamental enabler for enhanced user experiences and increased energy efficiency in mobile and consumer devices. OpenCL is a key standard for turning these goals into reality,” said Jem Davies, ARM fellow and vice president of technology, media processing division, ARM. “We look forward to expanding our current Full Profile OpenCL 1.1 support and to including OpenCL 1.2 as part of the ARM Mali-T600 GPU series.”

“Intel is pleased by the improved portability and interoperability delivered by the OpenCL 1.2 specification update,” said Bill Savage, vice president and general manager of the Developer Products Division of Intel’s Software and Services Group. “These improvements should foster developer innovation and are important steps in the evolution of the OpenCL feature set.”

“We continue to see growing interest from our customers and partners in using OpenCL to deliver high performance compute from our GPUs. Imagination’s PowerVR Series6 architecture is optimized for OpenCL, so we are delighted to see this latest update to the specification, which brings improved functionality in key application areas such as image processing to GPU Compute,” says Tony King-Smith, Vice-President marketing for imagination Technologies. “We remain convinced that OpenCL will be a ‘cornerstone’ API for parallel and heterogeneous processing in the years ahead.”

“Vivante is pleased to be one of the leading mobile IP promoters and contributors of OpenCL 1.2. With strong industry support and a robust ecosystem built around compute, OpenCL 1.2 strengthens the foundation and building blocks to enable broad adoption of the compute API across all market segments,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante. “As the technology goes mainstream, our goal is to make sure consumers using Vivante products get the perfect balance of performance, features, programmability, and extreme low power.”    

Khronos at SIGGRAPH Asia 2012
  Find out more about Open CL at the Khronos hosted “DevU for Educators” - a full day seminar at SIGGRAPH Asia to brief educators on the latest Khronos APIs, and for educators to engage with Khronos members on how academia and industry can work together to create consistently effective courses and examinations on these important industry standards.  The DevU for Educators session will be held on December 1, 2012, in Conference Hall K of Singapore Expo from 10AM to 6PM – all SIGGRAPH Asia attendees are welcome to attend.  More information: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/siggraph-asia-2012-singapore

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenVX™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVX™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC, OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases ASTC Next-Generation 
Texture Compression Specification

Content developers to benefit from smaller, lower bandwidth textures with higher quality and wider flexibility

August 6th, 2012 – Los Angeles, SIGGRAPH 2012 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the royalty-free, Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC™) LDR extension specification, defining a new, highly flexible texture compression scheme for developers using both the OpenGL® ES and OpenGL® 3D graphics APIs. ASTC is an exceptionally efficient compression technology which allows encoding of for a wide variety of texture formats at bit-rates of 8 bits per pixel to below 1 bit per pixel. ASTC is published as a Khronos extension, KHR_compressed_texture_astc_ldr, which is available from t he Khronos website at http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/.

“ASTC enables deep reductions in GPU memory bandwidth and application memory footprint,” said Tom Olson, chair of the OpenGL ES working group. “This new technology offers a huge step up in image quality compared to the leading existing formats.”

ASTC was developed under the cooperative process at Khronos and enables the size of textures images used in 3D games and applications to be significantly reduced while being downloaded and stored – saving memory size, access bandwidth and significantly reducing application size.

Aras Pranckevičius from game engine provider Unity 3D said: “ASTC is awesome! Texture compression that is higher quality, lower bitrate and with more control than any existing compression formats? Yes please!”

ASTC supports monochrome, luminance-alpha, RGB and RGBA formats, as well as X+Y and XY+Z formats for surface normals, and provides the flexibility for any format to be encoded at any bit rate. Uniquely, the encoding method is chosen independently for each block of pixels in the image, so that the coding adapts dynamically to most efficiently represent the image region-by-region. Advanced fractional-bit encoding and dynamic tradeoffs between the different types of data in each block means that ASTC outperforms all currently available texture compression schemes in image quality, and GPU power consumption, while processing compressed textures.

“We’re proud of ASTC and the benefits in reduced memory bandwidth and improved energy-efficiency that this innovative approach to compression will provide,” said Jem Davies, ARM Fellow and Vice President of Technology, Media Processing Division, ARM. “It will drive standardization and help accelerate visual computing for advanced applications across a wide range of consumer devices.”

“ASTC is a great step forward for the industry,” said Phil Rogers, AMD corporate fellow. “With ASTC we address several problems at once: support for advanced rendering techniques, reducing memory bandwidth and running at lower power. ASTC is a truly modern approach to texture compression, and we look forward to rapid and enthusiastic adoption.”

“Imagination has long been a leading developer of advanced texture compression technologies for mobile and embedded GPUs, so we applaud the technical achievements underpinning the new ASTC format. As a staunch supporter of open standards, in particular the Khronos family of APIs, we welcome ASTC as a true cross-platform state-of-the-art texture compression technology, whose creation is testimony to the collaborative abilities of Khronos,” said Tony King-Smith, vice president marketing, Imagination. “We are committed to adding ASTC to the extensive portfolio of texture compression standards supported by future PowerVR GPUs.”

“ASTC is the most important new standard in hardware texture compression technology in many years, satisfying developer demands for a high quality, highly compressed texture format with an alpha channel,” said Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA and president of the Khronos Group. “A universally supported compressed texture format will reduce authoring costs, and enable compact, unified 3D content to be transported and processed efficiently on diverse platforms, including mobile devices and a wide variety of WebGL-enabled browsers.”

Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2012

Wednesday August 8th at the JW Marriott Los Angeles at LA Live held in the Gold Ballroom, Salon 3:

Event	Time	Description
News Conference	1-2PM	Headlines of all Khronos news announcements at SIGGRAPH
COLLADA BOF	2-3PM	Latest community updates on the open standard for 3D asset interchange
OpenCL BOF	3-4PM	OpenCL 1.2 overview, utilities, vendor updates & developer perspective
WebGL BOF	4-5PM	Community updates, latest techniques and demos for 3D on the Web
OpenGL ES	5-6PM	Updates to the world’s most popular 3D API
OpenGL BOF	6-7PM	The latest on the OpenGL 3D ecosystem
OpenGL Party	7-10PM	Beer, basketball and prizes celebrating OpenGL’s 20th Anniversary

Visit Khronos at booths #758 and #759 to see members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVL, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC, OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 3.0 Specification 
to Bring Mobile 3D Graphics to the Next Level

Next generation mobile applications to benefit from richer 3D feature set and enhanced portability

August 6th, 2012 – Los Angeles, SIGGRAPH 2012 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® ES 3.0 specification, bringing significant functionality and portability enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is used on the majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets.  OpenGL ES 3.0 provides access to state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality with portability across diverse mobile and embedded operating systems and platforms.  OpenGL ES 3.0 is backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0, enabling applications to incrementally add new visual features to applications.  The full specification and reference materials are available for immediate download at http://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/.

“OpenGL ES 3.0 draws on proven functionality from OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2 and carefully balances the introduction of leading-edge technology with addressing the real-world needs of developers,” said Tom Olson, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and director of graphics research at ARM.

New functionality in the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification includes:

 
• multiple enhancements to the rendering pipeline to enable acceleration of advanced visual effects including: occlusion queries, transform feedback, instanced rendering and support for four or more rendering targets;
 
• high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
 
• a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations;
 
• greatly enhanced texturing functionality including guaranteed support for floating point textures, 3D textures, depth textures, vertex textures, NPOT textures, R/RG textures, immutable textures, 2D array textures, swizzles, LOD and mip level clamps, seamless cube maps and sampler objects;
 
• an extensive set of required, explicitly sized texture and render-buffer formats, reducing implementation variability and making it much ea sier to write portable applications.

The OpenGL ES working group at Khronos expects to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide extensive conformance tests for OpenGL ES 3.0 within six months, enabling implementers of the specification to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure.  This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.

“ARM has led the way in the implementation of OpenGL ES 2.0, enabling better graphics capabilities across a wide range of consumer devices. We know this will help developers design better user experiences,” said Kevin Smith, Vice President of Strategic Marketing, Media Processing Division, ARM. “OpenGL ES 3.0 enables more efficient solutions, utilizing the most advanced rendering techniques that will provide new levels of graphics excellence for mobile devices.  ARM has committed to this standard with support that includes the availability, at launch, of the OpenGL ES 3.0 emulation texture compression tool and an SDK to enable developers to get started immediately.”

“DMP is pleased to support the announcement of the latest OpenGL ES 3.0 standard that will be a dominant embedded graphics API for mobile, tablet, and consumer electronics industries, developers and end-users,” said Tatsuo Yamamoto, CEO of DMP Inc. “In addition to being one of the leading contributors for OpenGL ES working group, DMP SMAPH-S GPU IP family will provide the most scalable and efficient platform to take full advantage of the new features of OpenGL ES3.0 in next generation consumer and mobile devices.”   

“As a member of the Khronos group, we’re thrilled to see the industry getting the new OpenGL ES 3.0 specification.  As high-resolution screens get more ubiquitous around the world, high quality and high performance 3D graphics are demanded everywhere,” said Hirotaka Suzuki senior vice president of HI Corporation.  “OpenGL ES 3.0 will enable us to create UI and User Experiences with super rich 3D graphics for various mobile devices without hassle. It will not only bring us performance and quality but also save our time and make developers’ lives easier.  We can’t wait to bring our UI and User Experience solutions to OpenGL ES 3.0 powered hardware.”

“The advanced features of Khronos’ OpenGL ES 3.0 constitute another significant step forward for mobile and embedded graphics, further blurring the boundaries between mobile and traditional high end graphics platforms and ushering in the next wave of feature-rich high performance GPUs for low power mobile and embedded markets,” says Tony King-Smith, vice president marketing, Imagination.  “Thanks to our close involvement throughout the development of the standard, all our PowerVR Series6 ‘Rogue’ GPU cores have been designed to support fully all features of OpenGL ES 3.0, and we look forward to playing a significant role in deployment of this exciting new level of mobile GPU capability through our many PowerVR Series6 licensees.”

“The careful evolution of this new 3D API will enable developers to create enhanced user experiences with increased portability and reduced costs,” said Neil Trevett, vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA and president of Khronos. “NVIDIA is committed to ensuring Tegra processors provide the best platform for mobile developers, and we welcome the release of OpenGL ES 3.0.”

“The new features in OpenGL ES 3.0 that minimize power consumption while improving image quality and performance will help Qualcomm provide even better visual experiences with our Adreno™ GPUs integrated in our Snapdragon™ processors,” said Tim Leland, director of product management at Qualcomm.

“As a founding member of Khronos and originator of the OpenGL ES initiative we are delighted to see the API evolve and remain at the forefront of today’s embedded graphics industry,” said Tim Lewis, director of marketing, ZiiLABS.  “From its inception OpenGL ES has offered developers a state-of-the-art API to harness the capabilities of next-generation embedded GPUs, and this latest release keeps the API as relevant now as it was back in 2003. We can now look forward to working through the conformance process with our latest StemCell media processors.”

Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2012

Wednesday August 8th at the JW Marriott Los Angeles at LA Live held in the Gold Ballroom, Salon 3:

       

Event	Time	Description
News Conference	1-2PM	Headlines of all Khronos news announcements at SIGGRAPH
COLLADA BOF	2-3PM	Latest community updates on the open standard for 3D asset interchange
OpenCL BOF	3-4PM	OpenCL 1.2 overview, utilities, vendor updates & developer perspective
WebGL BOF	4-5PM	Community updates, latest techniques and demos for 3D on the Web
OpenGL ES	5-6PM	Updates to the world’s most popular 3D API
OpenGL BOF	6-7PM	The latest on the OpenGL 3D ecosystem
OpenGL Party	7-10PM	Beer, basketball and prizes celebrating OpenGL’s 20th Anniversary

Visit Khronos at booths #758 and #759 to see members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVL, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.3 Specification with Major Enhancements

Full backwards compatibility maintained; API specification and reference documentation available now

August 6th, 2012 – Los Angeles, SIGGRAPH 2012 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.3 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface). OpenGL 4.3 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification while maintaining full backwards compatibility, enabling applications to incrementally use new features while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The OpenGL 4.3 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

Twenty years since the release of the original OpenGL 1.0, the new OpenGL 4.3 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.30 update to the OpenGL Shading Language.

New functionality in the OpenGL 4.3 specification includes:

• compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation such as image, volume, and geometry processing within the context of the graphics pipeline;
• shader storage buffer objects that enable vertex, tessellation, geometry, fragment and compute shaders to read and write large amounts of data and pass significant data between shader stages;
• texture parameter queries to discover actual supported texture parameter limits on the current platform;
• high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;
• debug capability to receive debugging messages during application development;
• texture views for interpreting textures in many different ways without duplicating the texture data itself;
• indirect multi-draw that enables the GPU to compute and store parameters for multiple draw commands in a buffer object and re-use those parameters with one draw command, particularly efficient for rendering many objects with low triangle counts;
• increased memory security that guarantees that an application cannot read or write outside its own buffers into another application’s data;
• a multi-application robustness extension that ensures that an application that causes a GPU reset will not affect any other running applications.

“Developer feedback has been key to creating a faster, more capable API that meets emerging needs, such as providing a secure platform for GPU-accelerated web applications using WebGL and compute shaders that harness GPU parallelism for advanced computation,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA released beta OpenGL 4.3 drivers today, so developers can immediately use this new functionality on NVIDIA desktop GPUs.” (More information at http://www.nvidia.com/content/devzone/opengl-driver-4.3.html)

Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2012

Wednesday August 8th at the JW Marriott Los Angeles at LA Live held in the Gold Ballroom, Salon 3:

Event	Time	Description
News Conference	1-2PM	Headlines of all Khronos news announcements at SIGGRAPH
COLLADA BOF	2-3PM	Latest community updates on the open standard for 3D asset interchange
OpenCL BOF	3-4PM	OpenCL 1.2 overview, utilities, vendor updates & developer perspective
WebGL BOF	4-5PM	Community updates, latest techniques and demos for 3D on the Web
OpenGL ES	5-6PM	Updates to the world’s most popular 3D API
OpenGL BOF	6-7PM	The latest on the OpenGL 3D ecosystem
OpenGL Party	7-10PM	Beer, basketball and prizes celebrating OpenGL’s 20th Anniversary

Visit Khronos at booths #758 and #759 to see members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

###

Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVL, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.