The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, today announces a request for industry feedback to gauge interest in developing a new low-level, heterogeneous communications open standard that could transform the way applications are developed for High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) systems. If there is industry support, then Khronos would create a working group and invite any interested company to participate for a voice and a vote in creating and evolving a multi-vendor standard under Khronos’ proven multi-company governance process. Those interested in finding out more and providing feedback are invited to visit the Khronos Heterogeneous Communication feedback page.
The traditional programming models and open standards for communications between processing elements have been left behind somewhat. The interconnect topologies have become more complex and fragmented. No longer is there a clear, unified communication standard that is suitable for all the new interfaces introduced by these heterogeneous architectures. Abaco felt no existing open standard API provided a unified solution. Abaco presented their case the Khronos Group proposing a new standard API called Takyon. Khronos has listened and created the “Heterogeneous Communications” Exploratory Group with a goal to gather industry support for development of a new standard and solicit additional proposals. Take a look and contribute here. For a more in-depth description of the problem, be sure to read Abaco's blog "Behind the times".
The new MoltenVK now allows run-time configuration of MoltenVK via environment variables, support for GPU switching was added and is enabled by default, queue family specialization was added but currently disabled by default, synchronous queue submits was added and enabled by default, there is now support for four queue families, support for the VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float and VK_KHR_variable_pointers extensions, and updated against the latest SPIR-V Cross. There is also some fixes and other internal improvements. Checkout the Change Log on GitHub and read more about this update on Phoronix.
If you have a 3D file you would like in glTF format, Sketchfab has the answer. They now support over 50 formats! Visit the 3D File Formats help page for more information.
The Khronos Group is running a survey on Vulkan learning materials and general education. Feedback will be used to guide our future planning in this area as we look to improve our resources. Take this opportunity to share your thoughts with us, it will effect the future of the Vulkan education and the findings will be presented to the Vulkan Working Group.
Illya Rudkin, Principal Engineer Safety-Critical Software, Alastair Murray, Principal Software Engineer and Victor Lomuller, Senior Software Engineer Compilers and SPIR-V, will be attending this year's Khronos F2F event in San Diego from 21st to the 25th January, 2019. Illya, Alastair and Victor would be delighted to speak to anyone attending the event interested in connecting Artificial Intelligence to Silicon. Please track them down via LinkedIn or using their contact form on Codeplay’s website or follow them on Twitter @codeplaysoft.
