Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, gave a keynote speech at inVISION on November 29th focusing on vision standards & the new Kamaros embedded camera API standard. The video from the keynote is now available (free registration required).

In this EE Times Europe article, Neil Trevett describes how the need for graphics and compute acceleration in embedded markets is growing. Cameras and sensor arrays are increasingly central to many use cases in diverse industries, ranging from automotive to industrial, and are generating increasingly rich data streams that require sophisticated processing. At the same time, advanced user interfaces are being developed using high-quality 3D graphics and even augmented-reality technology. However, the need to deploy accelerated processing, combined with the complexities of safety-critical certification, has created a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries. That has driven up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

Open standards have an important role in helping hardware and software vendors navigate this complex technology environment. Acceleration standards for the embedded market can enable cross-platform software reusability, decouple software and hardware development for easier deployment and integration of new components, provide cross-generation reusability, and facilitate field upgradability. Such standards reduce costs, shorten time to market, and lower the barriers to using advanced techniques such as inferencing and vision acceleration in compelling real-world products.

Microsoft’s merge request to Mesa has been submitted bringing SPIR and SPIR-V support to the CLOn12 effort to allow OpenCL over DirectX 12 through Mesa.

Today Khronos released v3.0.6 of the OpenCL Specifications. This is a regular maintenance release with bug fixes and clarifications, an updated address spaces section, new extensions for additional subgroup functions, and an extension for enhanced platform and device version queries. Also, documentation for the C++ for OpenCL V1.0 kernel language is now downloadable from an OpenCL-Docs GitHub repository tag, describing how the language combines C++17 functionality with familiar OpenCL kernel language paradigms. An extension for online compilation of C++ for OpenCL kernels was published earlier this year and offline compilation of C++ for OpenCL kernels has been supported by clang release 9.0 onwards.

Google Summer of Code announced their projects last month and on June 1st the programming has begun. Projects this year include OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenXR, SPIR, Vulkan and WebGL. On September 8th, the results of GSoC will be announced.

This year IWOCL & SYCLcon 2020 had a record number of high quality submissions in all categories; research papers, technical presentations, tutorials and posters. These video presentations from the IWOCL & SYCLcon 2020 program of papers, tech. presentations and posters are now online.

There are several great Khronos related meetings for April 2019: “OpenXR 0.90 Provisional Specification Review” on April 10th in Cambridge MA USA, “Munich Meetup April 2019” on April 12th in Munich Germany with Dr Chajdas and friends covering Vulkan, SPIR-V and GLSL, and starting on April 16th is a three part meet up on “A Gentle Introduction to Shaders 1” in London UK. Learn more about these meet ups and how Khronos can help support your Khronos related meet up.

Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) is thte AMD offline compiler and integrated code analysis tool, supporting the high-level shading and kernel languages that are consumed by DirectX 11, Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL, including HLSL, GLSL, the OpenCL kernel language, and SPIR-V. Along with support for Vulkan in the RGA GUI, the biggest new feature in RGA 2.1 is a new analysis system that lets you obtain the GCN machine ISA and hardware resource information, using the compiler in the running driver that you have in your system. Learn more on the Radeon GPU Blog from AMD.

Illya Rudkin, Principal Engineer Safety-Critical Software, Alastair Murray, Principal Software Engineer and Victor Lomuller, Senior Software Engineer Compilers and SPIR-V, will be attending this year’s Khronos F2F event in San Diego from 21st to the 25th January, 2019. Illya, Alastair and Victor would be delighted to speak to anyone attending the event interested in connecting Artificial Intelligence to Silicon. Please track them down via LinkedIn or using their contact form on Codeplay’s website or follow them on Twitter @codeplaysoft.

Shader Conductor is one of several open-source projects for going from one shading language to another. With Microsoft’s Shader Conductor the focus is on converting HLSL to GLSL or SPIR-V (OpenGL/Vulkan), ESSL (OpenGL ES), MSL (Apple Metal), and older HLSL shader models. Shader Conductor can handle all shader stages, including geometry and compute shaders. Learn more about this new Open Source project from Microsoft.

The Khronos Group standards logos are now available for download on Sketchfab. Sketchfab makes it easy for anyone to publish and find 3D content online. Available logos currently include OpenXR, OpenCL, NNEF, OpenVX, SPIR, Vulkan, WebGL, SYCL and glTF. OpenGL has not been overlooked and will be arriving shortly.

The Khronos Group has made public the SPIRV LLVM Translator Github repository which contains source code for the LLVM/SPIR-V Bi-Directional Translator, a library for translating between LLVM and SPIR-V. The LLVM/SPIR-V Bi-Directional Translator is open source software.

Intel has joined the party with NVIDIA and AMD in offering launch-day Linux driver support for the new Vulkan 1.1 update from The Khronos Group. This ANV Vulkan driver support continues targeting Broadwell “Gen 8” graphics hardware and newer. Learn more about the Intel drivers.

The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3 specifications. Version 1.1 expands Vulkan’s core functionality with developer-requested features, such as subgroup operations, while integrating a wide range of proven extensions from Vulkan 1.0. Khronos will also release full Vulkan 1.1 conformance tests into open source and AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers.



Vulkan now ships natively on almost all GPU-enabled platforms, including Windows 7, 8.X, 10, Android 7.0+ and Linux, plus Khronos recently announced open source tools to enable Vulkan 1.0 applications to be ported to macOS and iOS. Vulkan has widespread support in leading games engines including Unreal, Unity, Source 2 from Valve, id Tech, CroTeam’s Serious Engine, CryEngine, and Xenko. Vulkan is being used in over 30 cutting-edge games on diverse desktop and mobile platforms, including Doom, Quake, Roblox, The Talos Principle, Dota 2, and is the exclusive API used in AAA titles such as Wolfenstein II and Doom VFR.



Read the press release and learn more about the Vulkan 1.1 specification and associated tests and tools on the Vulkan home page.

LunarG is pleased to announce the release of a new option in spirv-opt, which was designed to reduce SPIR-V size. This new option, -Os, allows developers to reduce SPIR-V size without specifying individual passes of spirv-opt. Learn more about this option at LunarG. For those developers who wish to have finer control over which passes are invoked, read more details about the available SPIR-V optimization options in the white paper by Greg Fischer of LunarG, titled SPIR-V Shader Size Reduction Using spirv-opt_v1.1.