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. There is a community feedback thread available in the OpenCL forums.
collada-viewer is a HTML5 app that brings together ColladaLoader.js, three.js, and HTML5 File API to allow easy persistent storage and loading of 3D models in the COLLADA file format.
If you happen to be an educator going to SIGGRAPH Asia this year, then you are in for a treat. The Khronos Group announces their first-ever KITE event geared towards educators. While our DevU events in the past have been successful at helping developers get familiar with our APIs, at this years DevU for Educators, the goal will be to provide you with the insight and understanding you need in order to include Khronos technologies in your teaching curriculum. Including this cutting-edge material in your classes will give your graduating students an edge – the same skills and proficiencies the industry’s recruiters are looking for in new engineers. All the details are available on the Khronos event page.
Two OpenCL resources to help get your through the long weekend: OCL-MLA as the name implies: a mid-level set of abstractions to make OpenCL development easier by providing a set of compile-time configurable logical devices that are mapped to actual node-level device resources; SKA is a static kernel analyzer which combines a static, linear pipeline simulator (similar to the IBM spu_timing tool) with architectural heuristics to model in-order instruction issue and pipeline behavior.
Intel shared plans early on that they want OpenGL ES 3.0 for Mesa by early 2013 with the next Mesa release. OpenGL ES 3.0 has a lot of new features over the aging OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, which makes it a really worthwhile upgrade. As part of this, Intel has been working on ETC2 texture compression and other functionality for this open-source Linux graphics driver. Ian Romanick of Intel has now shared on the Mesa mailing list that in the coming days he will begin to post the GLES3 patches for review and then merge them into mainline Mesa.
Altera Corporation announced the release of its Quartus II software version 12.1 design suite for CPLD, FPGA, SoC FPGA and HardCopy ASIC designs. Quartus II bolsters its support for high-level design flows with the inclusion of an SDK for OpenCL, and enhancements to both its Qsys system integration tool and DSP Builder model based design environment.
Shaderific is an educational app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch that makes it possible to write, compile and test OpenGL ES 2.0 shader programs directly on any iOS device. Version 2.4 adds a built-in reference for the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) and context-sensitive help. The reference comprises a detailed description of all GLSL data types, qualifiers, variables, constants, statements and functions. Context-sensitive help can be invoked while editing code by pressing the tab button on the extended keyboard.
The new Dynamics in SoC, GPU, and IP markets report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) covers mobile GPU market and the major devices in which such components are used. An executive report is available along with a table of contents online.
At SC12, AMD not only got the #1 award for the powerful and energy efficient supercomputer (SANAM) powered primarily by GPUs, AMD also announced an expansion of its software ecosystem by launching a series of tools that will enable HPC developers to take advantage of GPU compute with programming methodologies that integrate OpenCL.
Rightware introduces Browsermark 2.0. Browsermark is a free to use benchmark designed to measure and compare the performance of any browser on any internet enabled device. In addition to measuring general browsing functionality such as page loading and conformance testing for HTML5 and network speed, Browsermark 2.0 tests your browser with WebGL, Canvas, HTML5, and CSS3/3D. You can test your browser right here, right now, with Rightware.
The company released a 100,000 Stars app today that allows you to look at all of the neighboring stars as seen from our own solar system. The app uses WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio to bring you an experience that’s similar to viewing the fictitious star chart navigation systems found in the spaceships of awesome sci-fi movies.
Intel is extending OpenCL support to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. Developers can apply today to participate in the upcoming new Beta program for the Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications XE 2013. This SDK will provide development environment for OpenCL 1.2 applications across both Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor for Linux OSs. Apply online.
The OpenCL ICD extension (cl_khr_icd) allows multiple implementations of OpenCL to co-exist on the same system. The OpenCL ICD Loader Library allows applications to choose a platform from the list of installed platforms and dispatches OpenCL API calls to the underlying implementation. Source code for the ICD loader library is available in the Khronos registry. Consult LICENSE.txt in the tarball for full terms and conditions.
Altera Corporation announced the FPGA industry’s first Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL which combines the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA with the OpenCL parallel programming model. The SDK allows system developers and programmers familiar with C to quickly and easily develop high-performance, power-efficient FPGA-based applications in a high-level language. The Altera SDK for OpenCL enables FPGAs to work in concert with the host processor to accelerate parallel computation, at a fraction of the power compared to hardware alternatives. Altera will demonstrate the performance and productivity benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs at SuperComputing 2012 in booth #430.
This webinar offers an in-depth tutorial including a unique code walkthrough on how to use the hardware acceleration capabilities of the Intel® Media SDK and the Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications to help you get even more performance out of video applications. Sign up now and join the webinar on Thursday November 15 at 9am pacific time.