Web, 3D and OpenCL developers all benefit from latest updates to the Khronos suite of open, royalty free industry standards
SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — March 19, 2014 — Game Developer’s Conference – 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
Registered members of the press are invited to the Khronos Press Conference when Khronos will be providing exclusive access to OpenGL ES 3.1 demonstrations, along with presentations from the work group chairs, and guest analysts David Cole of DFC Intelligence and Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. The event takes place today, Wednesday March 19th at 10:00 AM at Moscone Center in the Khronos meeting room #262 on the South Mezzanine Level, near the press room. Coffee reception precedes the event at 9:30 AM in room #270. Please RSVP to jh@horizonpr.com.
“The latest releases of WebCL, SYCL, OpenGL ES 3.1 and EGL reflect the growing demand by developers for open, industry standards that meet the need for cross-platform deployment and innovation,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile ecosystem at NVIDIA. “Khronos is the ideal forum for creating and driving foundation layer APIs that connect software with silicon and ultimately leads to billions of users experiencing new levels of realism and interactivity on pervasive, mainstream devices.”
“This year DFC significantly raised our forecast for all game platforms, with PC games forecasted to be the largest sector; building on a record high of $23.5 billion in 2013 to $32 billion in 2017. Much of this growth is driven by emerging technology that better enables game developers to reach more users across multiple platforms and devices,” said David Cole, CEO and principal analyst, DFC Intelligence. “Greatly due to the development work done inside Khronos Group, a single game can now be played both on a PC and a mobile device; significantly enhancing the revenue potential.”
“Khronos Group has brought a real dynamism to the standards process. Back in 2000 the mobile industry had started to explode, and the market potential was obvious. There was a sense of urgency to develop OpenGL ES, and Khronos attracted talented people from both industry giants and small companies to get the job done,” said Jon Peddie, President, JPR Tiburon. “We are excited by the continuing development work at Khronos that will result in a blurring of boundaries between mobile and high end graphics platforms.”
GDC 2014 Press Release Summary
The full text of these press releases can be found here: https://www.khronos.org/news/press.
- OpenGL ES 3.1 Specification: On Monday 17th March, 2014 Khronos released the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification that brings the most desired features of desktop OpenGL 4.4 to developers wanting access to cutting-edge graphics techniques on today’s mobile and embedded devices.
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“OpenGL ES 3.1 provides developers with the ability to use cutting-edge graphics techniques on devices that are shipping today,” said Tom Olson, chair of the OpenGL ES working group and Director of Graphics Research at ARM. |
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- WebCL 1.0 Specification : WebCL defines a set of JavaScript bindings to OpenCL™ that enable Web-based applications to harness the computational resources of multi-core CPU and GPUs.
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“Samsung is pleased to have assisted in the creation of WebCL through chairing the WebCL Working Group,” said Tasneem Brutch, chair of the WebCL working group, and director at Advanced Software Platforms, Samsung Research America. |
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- SYCL 1.2 Provisional Specification : SYCL is a royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer that enables the development of frameworks that build on the underlying concepts, portability and efficiency of OpenCL, while adding the ease-of-use and flexibility of C++.
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“Developers have been requesting C++ for OpenCL to help them build large applications quickly and efficiently and there are lots of useful C++ libraries that want to port to OpenCL and SYCL makes this possible,” said Andrew Richards, CEO at Codeplay and chair of the SYCL working group. |
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- OpenCL 2.0 Adopters Program : The OpenCL Adopters Program and conformance test suite enables Khronos members to deliver the cross-vendor consistency required to protect the integrity of the standard in the marketplace. The first OpenCL 2.0 conformant implementations are expected to be released in the first half of 2014.
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“Robust conformance tests are critical to an open standard, as they ensure cross-vendor consistency, and enable protection of the standard,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile ecosystem at NVIDIA |
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- Provisional EGL 1.5 Specification : EGL provides the essential interface between Khronos APIs and the underlying window system and this new version includes enhanced rendering flexibility and security, improved interop between OpenGL and OpenCL, and standardized support for multiple operating systems including Android and 64-bit platforms.
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“EGL is in widespread use and is increasingly playing a crucial role in the Khronos ecosystem as it evolves into the central hub for interoperability between multiple APIs on multiple underlying platforms and EGL 1.5 is a significant step to enabling functionality across many platforms including Android, X Windows and Ubuntu-based systems,” said Alon Or-bach, senior software engineer at Samsung Electronics and chair of the EGL working group.“ |
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