Altera is demonstrating how its field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can enable system acceleration in trading and regulatory environments at the FIA Futures & Options Expo taking place November 3-5, 2015, at the Chicago Hilton (Green Hall, Booth #107). This industry event focuses on the technology requirements and critical issues associated with the financial derivatives market. Demonstrations at the Altera booth include include an OpenCL flow on an Arria 10 FPGA using the Altera SDK for OpenCL design tool running a Mandelbrot algorithm, video downscaling, and other applications.

The DesignWare® EV Family of vision processors consists of fully programmable and configurable IP cores that have been optimized for embedded vision applications, combining the flexibility of software solutions with the low cost and low power consumption of dedicated hardware. To speed application software development, the EV Processor Family is supported by a comprehensive software programming environment based on existing and emerging embedded vision standards including OpenCV and OpenVX, as well as Synopsys’ ARC MetaWare Development Toolkit.

The Brenwill Workshop Ltd. announced that they have added support for OS X to their MetalGL product, which seamlessly brings the performance of Metal to OpenGL ES games and applications on iOS, and now OS X. MetalGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple’s Metal graphics framework on compatible iOS and OS X devices. MetalGL unleashes the power of Metal’s low-latency rendering to let OpenGL ES games and applications perform up to 3x the number of draw calls, and benefit from the advanced tools available for the Metal development ecosystem, all without changing the way the game or app use OpenGL ES.

CSS-Tricks has a guest post by Matt DesLauriers on rendering SVG paths in WebGL. Matt discusses some of the tools and ideas involved in making it happen, as well as other approaches and other related concepts.

Now in its fourth year, the International Workshop on OpenCL will be held in Vienna, Austria, at the C3 Convention Center on April 19-21. April 19th is reserved for an Advanced Hands On OpenCL tutorial with April 20th – 21st consisting of a mix of keynotes, academic papers, technical presentations, tutorials and poster sessions. We are inviting high-quality submissions in four categories: Full Academic Papers; Technical Presentations; Tutorials; Posters.

Altera Corporation ALTR, -0.44% is demonstrating programmable logic-based security and system acceleration solutions for military grid communications, data centers, satellite communications and radar systems at MILCOM 2015 in Tampa, Florida, from October 26 to 28, 2015. Demonstrations from Altera and its ecosystem partners include the following technologies: A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) back-projection algorithm running on an Altera 20 nm Arria® 10 FPGA, using the Altera OpenCL SDK flow and hardened IEEE 754-compliant DSP blocks for radar back-end processing; Several complete cognitive radio solution demonstrations from front-end tactical handhelds/portables to rack-mount systems, using the RedHawk SDR architecture and hardware acceleration with an OpenCL flow.

ARM announced a new GPU from the same family as Mali-400 that uses only half as much power. The new GPU, the Mali-470, is targeted at next-generation wearables and IoT devices that need low-cost and low-power chips. The new Mali-470 comes with support for the ubiquitous OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics API. According to ARM, it brings a strong balance between pixel control and energy efficiency, which makes it well-suited for user interfaces. Users aren’t likely to play 3D games on their smartwatches any time soon, so OpenGL ES 3.0 and beyond shouldn’t be necessary. (By the time it is, the more efficient Vulkan should be the de facto graphics API.)

@Xavier_Ho gave a talk on WebGL at the “High-Performance and Immersive Visualisation” Brisbane Meetup. Checkout his online slide set.

IWOCL has posted video from 2015 IWOCL conference. Videos include talks from Qualcomm, Codeplay, Texas Instruments, Xilinx, Intel and AMD, all Khronos Members.

Vulkan is able to cover a wide range of platforms and hardware with vastly different form factors and power envelopes. Vulkan can run on a smart watch or a high end workstation, or anything in between. These platforms are going to have completely different capabilities and for good reason – they have different use cases in mind. Read more to understand how Vulkan has been designed to support all platforms.

Khronos announced that the glTF™ 1.0 (GL Transmission Format ) royalty-free specification for transmission and loading of 3D content has been finalized for Ratification and is immediately available for use by tools and application vendors. glTF is an efficient, interoperable asset delivery format that compresses the size of 3D scenes and models, and minimizes runtime processing by applications using WebGL™ and other APIs. glTF also defines a common publishing format for 3D content tools and services.

Imagination Technologies are very excited to announce an upcoming series of talks designed to discuss the Vulkan API in more detail. Imagination is a promoter member of the Khronos Group and a keen supporter of open standards for mobile graphics. Imagination is currently collaborating with the Vulkan working group to ensure the final version of the API is optimally designed for today’s mobile and desktop GPU architectures.

During this virtual AR Community meeting on Thursday October 15, 2015 participants will learn about the status of the Khronos Group glTF specification, experiences with implementation and we will discuss the role of glTF in reducing the complexity and bandwidth of compressing and transmitting 3D assets for use in AR experiences. Presenters will share the work the Khronos Group members are doing, trends in use of glTF and how this will impact AR. Speakers include: Neil Trevett, VP NVIDIA and President Khronos Group; Patrick Cozzi, Cesium and Marius Preda, Institut Telecom Sud-Paris.

Mesa 11.0.3–according to the internal release notes–is a major bugfix release that resolves the KDE and Weston regressions that have been introduced in the previous release of the software, Mesa 11.0.2. Additionally, Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0.3 has a great number of patches for EGL and includes numerous bugfixes, especially for the Intel i830, Intel i915, Intel i965, RadeonSI, and Nouveau graphics drivers, as well as various under-the-hood improvements. “Mesa 11.0.3 is now available. In the current release we have a bunch of EGL patches, mangledGL build fixes and a healthy amount of driver bugfixes - RadeonSI, Nouveau, Intel i915 and i965,” says Emil Velikov, software release engineer for Collabora. “Last but not least, the KDE/Weston regression introduced with 11.0.2 has also been resolved.”

VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. and Vivante Corporation announced a definitive merger agreement under which the companies will be combined in an all-stock transaction. The combined company, to be called VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd., will offer robust IP-centric, platform-based custom silicon solutions and end-to-end semiconductor turnkey services.