Xiaomi introduced its flagship tablet Mi Pad last week. Xiaomi Mi Pad houses the new generation Nvidia Tegra K1 processor. Inside, it packs ARM Cortex A15 quad-core chipset which can clock 2.2GHz CPU cycles and is backed by GeForce Kepler (192 cores) graphics engine. It is 1.5 times more energy efficient than other mobile GPUs and supports OpenGL 4.4, OpenGL ES 3.1 and tessellation, says the company. Mi Pad runs on the tweaked Android OS (4.4.4 KitKat) with MIUI v6.0. Unlike other UIs we see in Samsung, HTC, Sony and LG devices, Xiaomi’s MIUI has a feature-rich interface and is refreshing. It is more like a hybrid between Android and iOS, yet simple and visually appealing.

Synopsys, Inc announced availability of its new ASIP Designer tool that speeds the design of application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs) and programmable accelerators. Integrated LLVM-based compiler front-end and OpenCL kernel language support enables efficient compilation of C, C++ and OpenCL-based application code.

The new AIDA64 release implements optimized benchmarks for AMD “Carrizo” and Intel “Broadwell” processors, SensorPanel and external LCD improvements, and supports the latest nVIDIA GeForce and Quadro graphics accelerators, including OpenCL 2.1 support.

Neil Trevett, Khronos Group President, spoke at the recent GPU Technology Conference on Vulkan, SPIR-V and OpenCL 2.1 as well as at the WebGL Meetup on Building Standards. Both presentations are now available online.

Have a cool completed or work-in-progress 3D Web project? Submit it by April 6th for a chance to participate in 3D Web Fest. 3DWebFest is coming to San Francisco on May 13th, 2015 to celebrate the best of the 3D Web.

With the recent release of 347.88 drivers, NVIDIA adds official support for the NV_command_list extension. This extension has already been disclosed at last year’s SIGGRAPH ASIA and just days ago at the GPU Technology Conference 2015. The GTC presentation highlights the various benefits of the extension and the new possibilities it allows. Its primary goal is to allow current OpenGL applications to leverage the hardware to its full degree by providing the quickest possible path through the driver and benefit from future graphics API trends today. When adopting new concepts such as pipeline state objects and command buffers in current OpenGL applications, developers can also familiarize themselves with these modern software approaches and the implications and possibilities they have on their software architecture. However its feature set goes beyond what other graphics APIs are offering by enhancing the draw indirect mechanism with a flexible and extensible token-based command buffer approach. The spec can be found at the NVIDIA developer site and will be posted to the OpenGL registry soon. Sample code is provided.

CL3VER, the cloud based platform for interactive 3D presentations, releases CL3VER 3.0, the new generation of the platform dedicated to engineers, architects, and other design professionals. 3.0 a much improved version of the CL3VER platform that includes WebGL GPU-based real-time lightmap technology, V-ray material support and a new scene sharing system that will speed up the production workflow for WebGL based interactive 3D presentations.

Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, talks Steam Machines, Free Source 2.0 Engine, the growth of PCs, Steam Controller and Vulkan.

Voices of VR has three new podcasts featuring Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group. The podcasts include an overview of the Khronos Group, the new Vulkan API, OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V.

OpenCL 2.1 Technical Overview session video is now online:

As more and more devices support the OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics feature set, there needs to be a benchmark to test these devices and see how well they do with OpenGL ES 3.1 games that take advantage of all the new features. RightWare has released its newest version of Basemark ES, which is also the only benchmark tool available on the market to test the new OpenGL ES 3.1 features—Basemark ES 3.1.

The Khronos group has uploaded slide decks from the Vulkan and OpenCL presentations at GDC. The original press briefing slide deck is included. The slides cover SPIR-V as well and can also be seen in the online video from the March 5th Vulkan session.

The complete Khronos Vulkan session from offsite GDC is now online:

Please join us at 2PM pacific time for a Live Stream of the second and last Vulkan session at GDC. There will be better quality video and slides available in the next few days.

LunarG has posted a video providing an overview of GLAVE, an open source tool for debugging Vulkan applications. GLAVE is being developed by Valve and LunarG.