Imagination Technology has several OpenCL job postings in the UK including OpenCL Compiler Senior Design Engineer, OpenCL Driver Design Engineer and OpenCL Compiler Design Engineer.

Intelligraphics is pleased to announce a 5-day intensive OpenGL™ ES & EGL training course February 9th-13th 2009. This course is tailor-made with driver developers in mind primarily focusing on OpenGL™ v1.1 and ES v2.0 for embedded systems development. The course also presents EGL v1.3 concepts and programming for creating drawing surfaces and initializing contexts.

Sony and Intel are teaming together to provide better COLLADA export/import for Max and Maya. The German company Netallied has been working on a brand new implementation, and the result of this work is now available in Beta on sourceforge. The new exporters and importers are taking advantage of direct streaming exporters, and SAX XML parsing for importers. Importing a 60MB COLLADA file into 3dsMAX takes 1.8sec with the new SAX based approach, in comparison to the previous FCOLLADA based importer: 39.7sec.

DAZ3D recently released Carrara 7 Pro. Carrara is recognized as a robust, versatile software package of 3D tools that includes modeling, rigging, animating, terrain-building, rendering, and more. New in this version is Multi-Pass Rendering, 3D Paint, Improved Content Support, UV Editing/Unfolding, and a COLLADA Export.

Apple has purchased 8.2 million shares of Imagination Technologies Group (ITG) stock, giving Apple 3.6% ownership. ITG is the company behind the PowerVR MBX and PowerVR SGX and VXD. The SGX is compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0 which includes a shader engine for more realistic 3D graphics. The VXD is capable of handling resolutions up to full HD resolution.

The Guardian is reporting that Apple’s next OS revision ‘Snow Leopard’ will likely have a couple of new technologies to speed up software, without the requirement of new hardware. One is called Grand Central, and reportedly makes better use of the Intel processors in the current line of Macs. The second technology, OpenCL, will offers radical change, as it harnesses the power of the GPU. OpenCL will allow an application to work on whatever GPU the machine contains, on the fly. This has progressed faster than expected, in part because Apple brought the problem to the Khronos Group.

NEC System Technologies, Ltd. today announced the launch of license sales of embedded graphics IP “GA88 Series/IWAYAG” achieving high function, high performance vector graphics conforming to the latest version OpenVG 1.1 for digital home appliances, car navigation systems and other visual display functions installed embedded devices. This supports FlashPlayer and Adobe Flash Lite 3.1.5 embedded by Adobe Systems Incorporated and enables 5x to 10x faster Flash contents playback speeds.

Maemo.org has released a “pre-alpha” version of its Maemo 5 SDK. Based on Linux, and designed for Internet tablets such as Nokia’s N810, Maemo 5 brings hardware-based graphics acceleration for OMAP3, cellular connectivity, and support for HD cameras. Other interesting new open source software components include Libcanberra, OpenMax, PulseAudio, and Tracker.

In June 2008, Apple Inc. made news by unexpectedly announcing adoption of OpenCL for its next-generation OS. The entire picture of this strategy is now becoming clear. This is the direct response of a processor manufacturer to the impending risk that its current approach would lead to software developers leaving its platform. Multi-core computers are becoming more popular, GPUs are handling more than just graphics, and many processors with new architecture are emerging. OpenCL, which emerged in an era of processor chaos, is about to give software developers and equipment manufacturers the freedom to choose processors.

Strata 3D CX 5.6 has added tremendous power while becoming even more user-friendly. New features include: all functionality of the Design 3D[in] plug-in, 3D Texture Maker and Exporter, Collada import/export, 8 processor support, dynamically linked PSD texture maps, render to Photoshop layers, and much more.

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. This release adds new features such as support for COLLADA 1.4 and LWO files. Also included are an .OBJ file writer, an enhanced software rasterizer (burning video), FSAA for OpenGL, OGRE .mesh loader improvements and improved terrain rendering.

Movial, the company that inspires rich, intuitive Internet experiences, today announced it has joined the Khronos™ Group industry consortium. By joining the Khronos Group, Movial continues its ongoing commitment to support the development of open standards—including enabling the acceleration of graphics and multimedia on a wide variety of platforms and devices.

The Khronos Group has posted the presentations from Siggraph Asia 2008 online in PDF format. These presentations cover OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenVG and COLLADA. If you were not able to make the show, then these are must read for you.

NVIDIA Corporation today announced its full support for the newly released OpenCL 1.0 specification from the Khronos Group. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a new compute API that allows developers to harness the massive parallel computing power of the GPU. The addition of OpenCL is another major milestone in the GPU revolution that gives NVIDIA developers another powerful programming option. You can find the OpenCL specification on the Khronos Group website.

AMD today announced its intent to rapidly adopt the OpenCL 1.0 programming standard and integrate a compliant compiler and runtime into the free ATI Stream Software Development Kit (SDK). OpenCL 1.0 was ratified today by the The Khronos Group. AMD is a founding and contributing member of the OpenCL working group in The Khronos Group, and has consistently been one of the most vocal and active proponents of the standard.