The Khronos™ Group today in an earlier press conference announced a number of new and significant updates to its portfolio of open, royalty free industry standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision, sensor processing and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices:
OpenGL® ES 3.1 Specification Released – The next leap in mobile & embedded graphics
WebCL™ 1.0 Specification Released – Browser-based heterogeneous compute acceleration
SYCL™ 1.2 Provisional Specification Released – Enabling high-level C++ tools for OpenCL
OpenCL™ 2.0 Adopters Program Launched – Driving OpenCL 2.0 conformance
EGL™ 1.5 Specification Released – The essential glue for secure, integrated API rendering
The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and release of the EGL™ 1.5 specification. EGL is an open, royalty-free standard that defines a portable interface to underlying operating system and display platforms to handle graphics context management, surface and buffer binding, and rendering synchronization. EGL also provides interop capability to enable efficient transfer of data and events between Khronos APIs. The new EGL 1.5 specification incorporates functionality for enhanced rendering flexibility and security, improved interop between OpenGL® or OpenGL ES™ and OpenCL™ for mixed compute and rendering acceleration, and standardized support for multiple common operating systems including Android and 64-bit platforms.
The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the WebCL™ 1.0 specification. Developed in close cooperation with the Web community, WebCL extends the capabilities of HTML5 browsers by enabling developers to offload computationally intensive processing to available computational resources such as multicore CPUs and GPUs. WebCL defines JavaScript bindings to OpenCL™ APIs that enable Web applications to compile OpenCL C kernels and manage their parallel execution. Like WebGL™, WebCL is expected to enable a rich ecosystem of JavaScript middleware that provides access to accelerated functionality to a wide diversity of Web developers.
March 19, 2014 – San Francisco, Game Developer’s Conference – The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of SYCL™ 1.2 as a provisional specification to enable community feedback. SYCL is a royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer that enables the development of applications and frameworks that build on the underlying concepts, portability and efficiency of OpenCL™, while adding the ease-of-use and flexibility of C++. For example, SYCL can provide single source development where C++ template functions can contain both host and device code to construct complex algorithms that use OpenCL acceleration - and then enable re-use of those templates throughout the source code of an application to operate on different types of data.
The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® ES 3.1 specification, bringing significant functionality enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API that is used on nearly all of the world’s mobile devices. OpenGL ES 3.1 provides access to state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality with portability across diverse mobile and embedded operating systems and platforms.