HPC Wire has a great article on OpenCL. The article reviews the organization and process behind OpenCL, gives a short overview of the nature of the proposal, and discusses the implications of OpenCL in the high-performance software development arena. The OpenCL initiative currently being developed by the Khronos Group is a royalty-free standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.

The Vincent SC project is working on a portable implementation of the OpenGL SC API specification. More information on OpenGL SC can be found on the Khronos web site at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/sc. The initial code base for VIncent SC is now available in the SVN repository on Sourceforge. Please follow the instructions under Code->SVN to download the latest version of the source code. The code is fairly stable, and has already been used to debug the OpenGL SC conformance test. Currently, the project workspaces and project files included in the upload are targeting Visual Studio 2008, and require SDL to be present for framebuffer access.For more information, or if you want to get involved, please contact the project administrator.

Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced the development of a new video-processing technology which enables a complete wraparound view of a vehicle’s perimeter in real time. This new technology uses the MB86R01 SoC(1) graphics chip for automobiles from Fujitsu Microelectronics Limited which supports the OpenGL ES 2.0. This technology will allow a driver to obtain an overview of their surroundings from a single image. This will allow them to grasp a situation surrounding the vehicle that requires immediate attention.

Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR™ SGX520 graphics processor core has achieved conformance with the Khronos™ OpenGL® ES 2.0 standard. POWERVR SGX520 is claimed to be the world’s smallest 3D graphics processor solution to achieve OpenGL ES 2.0 conformance. POWERVR SGX520 is less than 2.6mm2 in TSMC 65LP process. POWERVR SGX supports OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG™ 1.0, while the previous generation POWERVR MBX 3D acceleration core, already deployed in more than 100m phones and other devices, supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.0.1.

Nikkei Electronics Magazine of Japan has watched Khronos Group’s newest API “OpenCL” since its working group established in June 2008. They had a reporter attend the first technical session of OpenCL at SC08 in Austin, Texas. View this news article in Japanese. Account is required.

Users of Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 will be able incorporate 3D CAD models designed in SolidWorks® software to simulate their operation more accurately. Developers will be able to correct any issues in their robotic application early on to maximizing the robots’ performance. The solution is possible because both applications support COLLADA for rendering 3D objects and for motion.

Apple first announced at this past June’s Worldwide Developer Conference that OpenCL would be a linchpin of the next major OS X release, code-named Snow Leopard. OpenCL’s addition to the Mac OS would, according to Apple, allow applications to “tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.” The OpenCL standard was pushed out in six months. “If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group said. “That’s quite commonplace. You actually have to really push to get it down to eighteen months. Our record was 12 months, up to now; we’ve done this one in six.”

The Khronos Group invites everyone to attend the free Khronos DevU sessions at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008.

Adobe announced it would develop optimized versions of its AIR and Flash 10 apps for ARM11 and Cortex processors. The partnership specific to ARM includes a combination of chipmakers such including Broadcom, Freescale, NVIDIA, Samsung and Texas Instruments. This version will use both a newer and faster generation of ARM processors as well as OpenGL ES 2.0-capable graphics hardware to handle tasks that were previously impractical for lower-performance devices.

ALT Software, the leading provider of advanced graphics software for safety-critical embedded systems, announced the launch of OpenGL SC support for the ATI Mobility Radeon™ X1400 graphics processor unit (GPU) from AMD. Building on the success of its certifiable OpenGL driver libraries for the ATI Mobility Radeon™ 9000, and developed as a part of ALT Software’s continued commitment to supporting the AMD Embedded GPU roadmap, this OpenGL SC software stack enables embedded system integrators and OEMs to deploy highly complex graphical user interfaces in next generation avionics applications

COLLADA Asset Manager is a tool for asset management developed in windows .net. This tool is for artists, art directors, tool makers, and anybody who is interested in COLLADA and Asset Management.

Bentley software solutions provider introduces MicroStation. The first single-point solution to publish geospatially located 2D/3D models complete with 2D GIS data directly to the Google Earth environment. Publish DGN and DWG models from your desktop to COLLADA and the Google Earth™ 2D/3D environment. Zoom to any place on the planet with the touch of a button.