ExtremeTech discusses GPGPU computing on Windows 7. “Both Nvidia and ATI are committed to supporting DirectX 11 on their newest boards; and both now have early OpenCL drivers out as well. In particular, I expect both of their Windows 7 drivers will support OpenCL.” says Michael Miller.

WebGL is now available in WebKit nightlies. If you run Leopard or Snow Leopard you can try it out WebGL yourself. WebGL runs in the HTML Canvas element, and works similarly to the 2D Canvas capability currently in WebKit. You can download the nightly build on the Webkit website.

As OpenCL gains a descent foothold in the SuperComputing world, more researchers are starting to take notice. The folks at Scientific American point out the pitfalls that have slowed the progress of supercomptuing to-date, and give merit to the new solutions offered by the Open Computing Language (OpenCL). Seeing how researchers at Virginia Tech use a computer equipped with both a CPU and an AMD GPU to compute and visualize biomolecular electrostatic surface potential 1,800 times faster—from 22.4 hours to less than a minute—than they could with a similar computer driven only by a CPU, is just the beginning.

If you are using one of Chromium, latest WebKit or a recent nightly build of FireFox, you can view a WebGL port of Auld’s amazing 1K demo, Chocolux to WebGL. Chocolux is a real-time recursive GPU raytracer using four spheres. The possibilities are endless.

DMP has announced a new two day getting start GLSL Programming training course on December 10th and 11th 2009. This course introduces the world of programmable pipeline by explaining basic topics of the GLSL(OpenGL Shading Language) which is a core feature of OpenGL ES 2.x and OpenGL 2.x. The course is offered in Japan in Japanese.

The new ATI Stream SDK v2.0 - beta 4 adds OpenCL GPU support to the existing CPU support. Using AMD’s Khronos Group Conformant OpenCL implementation, developers will be able to take one source code base and re-target it to CPUs or GPUs - it will run on both - to take advantage of your entire platform. ATI Stream SDK Beta 4 also sees Microsoft® Windows® 7 and native Microsoft® Windows® 64-bit support. The Khronos Group has an active forum discussion available.

MacResearch has posted part 6 in their series of OpenCL tutorials. In this episode, a real-world code that has been parallelized by porting to the GPU. The use of shared memory to improve performance is covered as well as a discussion of synchronization points for coordinated work within a work-group. Source code is provided.

Vivante Corporation today announced that Arkmicro Technologies, Inc. has licensed Vivante GPU IP for its newest mobile navigation and entertainment system-on-chip (SoC) designs. “The stunning visual effects offered by OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG 1.1 are driving a wide range of location based applications in markets around the globe,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante Corporation. Peter Shi, CEO of Arkmicro Technologies, added, “Vivante GPUs give us the outstanding visual graphics quality and performance we need to extend our leading media SoC family of solutions.”

WebGL is being built into Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and now Google’s Chrome browser. WebGL can be used in the latest Chrome developer preview version—but only if “—enable-webgl” and “—no-sandbox” command-line switches are added when Chrome launches. The latest versions are Chrome 4.0.221.6 for Windows and 4.0.221.8 for Mac OS X and Linux.

The Khronos Group announced it has publicly released the OpenMAX™ AL 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance multimedia applications on mobile and embedded devices. The OpenMAX AL standard simplifies deployment of hardware and software audio, video and imaging capabilities across any platform or operating system. OpenMAX AL enables developers to create rich media applications across a wide range of hardware devices.

Graphic Remedy has released gDEBugger iPhone. gDEBugger iPhone is a unique debugging and profiling tool for iPhone games and applications developers, assisting them in producing robust, high-quality applications in a competitive environment. gDEBugger runs on top of Apple’s iPhone Simulator, enabling developers to debug and optimize iPhone OpenGL ES-based applications in their primary work environment.

NVIDIA just released its first OpenCL-conformant graphics driver to the public. Up to now, it was only available to registered members of its GPU Computing developers program. Get your OpenCL driver today.