The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Khronos Group Prioritizes China’s Participation in Creation of Key International Technology Standard

Khronos has over 100 international member companies and 15 active standards;
  Open, royalty-free standards powering the growth of the mobile industry;
  Alignment with international markets expands opportunities and avoids fragmentation

13th March, 2012 – Beijing, China – The Khronos™ Group, an international industry consortium creating open standards for the acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing, today commenced the opening events of its most recent tour to Beijing and Shanghai.  The Khronos Board of Directors, including AMD, Apple, ARM, Epic, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, SONY and Texas Instruments, has made engaging the participation of Chinese industry a priority and has committed significant financial and staffing resources to Chinese activities.  Khronos standards include OpenGL™ ES, the 3D graphics API used to power the user interface, games and applications on almost every smartphone in the world, OpenCL® for heterogeneous parallel computation and WebGL™ for 3D graphics for HTML5.

Khronos provides a forum for open, international industry cooperation to create, royalty-free standards that enable leading-edge operating systems and applications to access advanced computing and acceleration silicon.  Khronos standards enable the silicon community to define future acceleration functionality to drive market growth and industry momentum.  Khronos provides a state-of-the-art Intellectual property framework that protects both member IP and products shipping using conformant implementations of Khronos specifications.

Khronos launched a pan-Asian outreach tour in Beijing in December 2010 to encourage further Asian cooperation.  One outcome is that the Korean Government has made a significant financial investment to build the 3D Fusion Technology Center to be managed by Kyungpook National University that will be at the center of Khronos activities in Korea.  In February 2012, Taiwan selected one of their leading University professors to lead educational activities in Taipei and Khronos has been invited to return to meet with Taiwanese industry and academic members at Computex.

“We recognize China as a key player in the global mobile industry and therefore have prioritized the participation of the Chinese technology industry to contribute to the development of mobile acceleration standards,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.  “The royalty-free ecosystem of Khronos API standards continues to be shaped through international participation, and is ideal for expanding global market opportunities. Chinese companies will benefit significantly from Khronos participation and standards development will, in return, reflect Chinese industry requirements and priorities.”

Khronos has a series of free training and outreach events here in China this week, where any interested companies, universities or students are welcome to attend a day of lectures by Khronos technology experts. The sessions feature an industry analysis by Dr. Jon Peddie, President of JPR, a leading graphics consultancy, and a panel session conducted by Kathleen Maher, senior analyst at JPR.  Details on the Beijing DevU on 14th March are here: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/beijing-china-devu-2012.  Details on the Shanghai event on March 17th are here: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/shanghai-china-2012.

Khronos has created a Chinese language technical forum at cn.khronos.org, and is requesting volunteers who are fluent in Chinese and English and possess a firm understanding of the technical aspects of our APIs to apply to help moderate the forum.  If you are interested in applying, please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Continuing the Khronos commitment to engaging with the China technology industry, the Khronos Group will exhibit at the China Game Developer Conference on July 25-27, 2012 in Shanghai, where guests are invited see Khronos members demonstrate Khronos-based products in the “Khronos Pavilion” and learn about Khronos APIs at “Developer University.”  More details at:
  http://www.khronos.org/news/events/cgdc-2012#devu.

About The Khronos Group
  The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL, WebCL and OpenVL are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

New white paper examines how GPGPUs and OpenCL can be used for improved performance in Natural User Interfaces

Barcelona, Spain – February 28, 2012 – YOUi Labs (www.youilabs.com), experts in developing Natural User Interfaces (NUI) for embedded platforms, examines in a new white paper how both General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) and The Khronos Group’s OpenCL specification can be used in a NUI engine to best utilize the available hardware for efficiency and improved user experience.

“We are excited to harness the power of GPGPU Chips using the OpenCL specification for embedded platforms to enable us to design and develop richer natural user experiences,” said YOUi Labs CEO Jason Flick.

NUIs must perform without hesitation and require more graphical processing power than traditional UIs. Unlike video games, however, a NUI’s content is not predictable and can not be cached or pre-processed. Due to this real-time content requirement, both CPU and GPU utilization must be carefully balanced to maximize NUI performance.

“The adoption of GPGPU and the Khronos OpenCL specification will enable us to offload precious CPU cycles traditionally required to perform real-time calculation on larger data sets to more efficient GPGPU cores speeding up the UI and saving power,” said YOUi Labs CTO Stuart Russell.

YOUi Labs is deep into the implementation of the strategies discussed in this white paper and will publish the technical results for performance benchmarks and power usage in the coming months.

The “Levering GPGPU and OpenCL Technologies for Natural User Interfaces” white paper is available as a public download from the YOUi Labs website (www.youilabs.com) as well as The Khronos Group website http://www.khronos.org.

About YOUi Labs
  When art meets science, something great happens. We live at that intersection. We’re a unique blend of math and physics engineers, visual artists and interaction designers who understand the true value of a great user experience. YOUi Labs (www.youilabs.com) exists to teach device manufacturers the new rules governing intimate user interfaces so they can swiftly meet – even exceed – their customers’ new expectations. We build the products that do that.

About The Khronos Group
  The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL, WebCL, OpenCL, OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenSL ES, OpenKODE, StreamInput and COLLADA. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

(YOUi Labs is a registered trade mark of YOUi Labs Inc. Other names used here may be registered trademarks of their respective owners.)

The white paper is available here.

Khronos Group Announces the KITE Initiative to Connect Industry to Education

KITE to catalyze cooperation between Khronos Members and the educational community teaching Khronos APIs

17th February, 2012 – Taipei, Taiwan – The Khronos™ Group, an industry consortium creating open standards for the acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing, today announced the launch of the KITE™ (Khronos Institute for Training and Education) Program.  KITE is a community-based, cooperative effort between the Khronos Group organization, its individual members, and the worldwide educational community; to encourage the wide availability of courses and a consistently high-level of quality in education regarding Khronos open standard APIs, such as OpenGL™ ES.  The KITE web-site is now available for educators and students to enroll and share courseware: http://www.khronos.org/kite/en/

The KITE Program is designed to enhance and support the efforts of educators teaching Khronos APIs, and provides a wide variety of opportunities for peer communication among educators and facilitates cooperation and collaboration between educators, students, researchers and Khronos Group members including:

 
• an openly available KITE Community web-site to host forums, Khronos Educator Guidelines, open courseware and an ecosystem hub to act as central clearing house for SDKs, sample source and other resources relating to Khronos APIs;
 
• KITE Chapters to enable regional discussions, meet-ups, and action in the local educational community;
 
• the KITE Colleague program that enables accredited educators to sign up for direct communication with Khronos working groups for industry expert review of courseware and input to the Khronos educational guidelines;
 
• optional KITE Certification for educators, institutes and companies undertaking training that enables use of Khronos and KITE trademarks and logos on promotional materials and courseware.

“KITE is a much-needed initiative to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The value proposition of Khronos API standards to industry has been well-documented. With KITE, academic and research institutions now have the opportunity to train their students and better prepare them for industry by leveraging the work done within the Khronos working groups. For Khronos, this collaboration with educators will encourage the availability of the skilled workforce needed to drive continued innovation in product development and deployment.  KITE is a win-win collaboration for everyone involved,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.

Korea has taken a leading role in defining and catalyzing the creation of the KITE Program with regular meetings to discuss how Khronos and the academic community can most effectively work together, resulting in the Korean government committing significant financial resources and support KITE in Korea.

“The Khronos KITE program will be essential for effectively teaching Khronos APIs in Korea and we hope that KITE will be an opportunity for academic participants to contribute to standardization in Korea and Khronos,” said Professor Nakhoon Baek at KNU.

The Khronos executive team, numerous work group chairs and Khronos members from Japan and Korea have also visited Taiwan this week to meet with industry, academic and government officials to work together to cooperatively define and respond to the needs of the local education community.

“I am excited and honored to be the first Taipei Chapter Chair for the new Khronos KITE educational program, and I look forward to coordinating the offer of support and assistance from Khronos with other ongoing programs between industry and the educational community here in Taiwan,” said Dr. Jenq-Kuen Lee, Director MOE Embedded Software Consortium and Professor at Department of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University.  “We are using Khronos standards such as OpenCL and we look forward to creating a productive liaison between key Khronos industry members and educators here in Taiwan for the benefit of local and international markets.  I think it will be very good for us to train students and engineers to meet international standards.”

“Khronos open standards, such as OpenGL ES, have become ubiquitous in the embedded and mobile markets and so are very significant to the Taiwanese industry. The KITE announcement is very welcome as it will enable a close collaboration between Khronos and the educational community in Taiwan.  This will ensure Taiwanese educational programs contain the very latest information about these important international standards,” said Dr. Ouhyoung, National Taiwan University.

Many of the original ideas about the formation and structure of KITE came from Khronos’ discussions with Professor Mike Bailey at Oregon State University.  “I am pleased to see KITE gain significant momentum.  The number of regional KITE chapters is already growing and the result will be a strong collaborative educational environment,” said Professor Mike Bailey, Oregon State University.  “As a teacher of Khronos APIs, I believe that bringing course material, educators and students together in this way will provide companies around the world with highly skilled candidates better prepared for work in innovative environments.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL are trademarks and WebCL is a certification mark of the Khronos Group Inc.  OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos.  All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX IL 1.2 Provisional Specification

OpenMAX IL VP8 and WebP Codec Component Extensions and Content Pipe 1.0 specification also publicly released today

14th February, 2012 – Beaverton, OR – The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of OpenMAX™ IL 1.2 as a provisional specification. OpenMAX IL is a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for integration of multimedia components into media frameworks to simplify deployment of audio/video encoders/decoders, camera control, and audio, video and image processing algorithms across diverse platforms. OpenMAX IL 1.2 is a backward compatible upgrade that includes dynamic buffer allocation, improved media graph management, in-band signaling, enhanced audio video synchronization, a wider range of standard components and enhanced camera control capabilities together with many other improvements and clarifications to increase interoperability between media processing components. The specification has been released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback before specification finalization. The OpenMAX IL 1.2 provisional specification is available for immediate download.

OpenMAX IL is the integration layer of the OpenMAX family of APIs for multimedia acceleration and application development. Khronos also provides the OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) API for object oriented access to rich media acceleration, and OpenSL ES for advanced audio capabilities. OpenMAX IL is well suited to provide the base graph building infrastructure for such higher-level APIs. A discussion forum for feedback on the OpenMAX IL specification is available online.

“The mobile market is constantly evolving and demanding ever increasing multimedia functionality and performance. The OpenMAX IL specification enables chipset vendors to take best advantage of their acceleration capabilities and is a key element of the overall Khronos solution for accelerated multimedia. This release is an important milestone, proposing an up-to date version of the specification to implementers, and is a strong base of work for future innovation,” said Thierry Vuillaume, standardization manager at ST-Ericsson CTO Office, and chair of the OpenMAX IL Working Group.

Khronos also today released a VP8 and WebP Codec Component extension for OpenMAX IL 1.1.2, enabling integration of encoders and decoders for VP8, the video codec used in WebM media format, and WebP image encoders and decoders, in existing OpenMAX IL implementations. The VP8 and WebP Codec Component extension is available online.

“OpenMAX IL support offers a straightforward, standardized method for device manufacturers to enable WebM hardware acceleration for playback or recording applications in leading mobile platforms,” commented Aki Kuusela, engineering manager for the WebM Project.

Also today, Khronos released the Content Pipe 1.0 specification. Previously part of OpenMAX 1.1.2, it is now presented as a standalone specification for use in conjunction with OpenMAX IL, OpenSL ES or OpenMAX AL. The Content Pipe specification abstracts data access to streamline media data transfer, enabling a multimedia system to be built for an arbitrary delivery method without having to deal with the specifics of the delivery details. In addition, the Content Pipe specification allows an application to preprocess the data before sending it to the underlying multimedia framework, such as in the case of proprietary delivery methods of premium media content. The Content Pipe specification is available for download online.

OpenMAX IL 1.2 Capabilities

The new OpenMAX IL 1.2 provisional specification includes the following improvements:

• The introduction of dynamic buffer allocation, in addition to statically pre-announced buffers, to enable the usage of OpenMAX IL in a wider range of frameworks;
• Improvements in robustness of the graph management, such as the elimination of possible race conditions, and the ability to cancel pending commands to avoid deadlocks;
• Additional in-band signaling, and event types, ensuring more efficient integration;
• The ability to group and commit multiple configuration settings atomically to ensure change of configuration without visible glitches;
• Enhanced reference clock selections, and media time notification mechanism for better audio / video synchronization.

The new OpenMAX IL 1.2 specification also widens the number of standard components to include audio and video technologies such as:

• 3D Audio Mixers;
• AMR WB+ Decoder\Encoder;
• Extended WMA and AMR formats;
• VC1 Video Decoder\Encoder;
• VP8 Video Decoder\Encoder;
• NAL Format support.

The OpenMAX IL 1.2 camera component is also updated with the following advanced capabilities:

• Enhanced Focus Range, Region and Status support;
• Field of View controls;
• Flash status reporting;
• ND Filter support;
• Assistant Light Control support;
• Flicker Rejection support;
• Histogram information;
• Sharpness control;
• Ability to synchronize shutter opening and closing events with audio playback.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos to Create New Open Standard for Computer Vision

Open call for contributions and industry participation in initiative to create acceleration API for computer vision applications and libraries; Working group meetings commencing in January 2012

13th December, 2011 – SIGGRAPH ASIA, Hong Kong – The Khronos™ Group today announced a new initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications.  In response to requests and proposals from members, Khronos has created a vision working group to develop a hardware acceleration API using the proven Khronos development process and aiming for a first public release within 12 months.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The vision working group will commence work during January 2012.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more.  Many modern consumer compute devices, from smartphones to desktop computers, can be capable computer vision systems but require hardware accelerated vision algorithms to work in real-time. Consequently, multiple hardware vendors have developed proprietary accelerated computer vision libraries leading to market fragmentation. The Khronos vision working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms.  More details on the vision working group processes and goals are here: http://www.khronos.org/vision.

The Khronos vision API will be able to accelerate high-level libraries, such as the popular OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus of the working group will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs.  The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.

“Computer vision will be central to enabling consumers to use and interact with their computing devices in compelling and magical ways - but this emerging market opportunity needs a firm foundation of cross-platform vision acceleration,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.  “We invite any company with an interest or expertise in vision processing to join us to help build a lasting standard that can be broadly adopted across multiple devices and market segments.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL are trademarks and WebCL is a certification mark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenCL 1.2 Specification

Industry leaders cooperate to evolve cross-platform open standard for heterogeneous parallel programming; Backwards compatible with OpenCL 1.1 to preserve code investment; Comprehensive OpenCL 1.2 conformance tests available

November 15th 2011 – SC11 - Seattle, WA – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors.  Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies.  Khronos has updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to ensure that implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development.  The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The OpenCL working group is listening carefully to feedback from the developer and middleware community to provide significant and timely functionality for heterogeneous computing in this cross vendor open standard,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.  “The OpenCL working group is also broadening its membership and has growing representation from the mobile and embedded industries and is enabling innovative devices such as FPGAs to be driven through OpenCL.”

OpenCL 1.2 enables significantly enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance through many updates and additions including:

 
• Device partitioning - enabling applications to partition a device into sub-devices to directly control  work assignment to particular compute units, reserve a part of the device for use for high priority/latency-sensitive tasks, or effectively use shared hardware resources such as a cache;
 
• Separate compilation and linking of objects - providing the capabilities and flexibility of traditional compilers enabling the creation of libraries of OpenCL programs for other programs to link to;
 
• Enhanced image support - including added support for 1D images and 1D & 2D image arrays. Also, the OpenGL sharing extension now enables an OpenCL image to be created from OpenGL 1D textures and 1D & 2D texture arrays;
 
• Built-in kernels represent the capabilities of specialized or non-programmable hardware and associated firmware, such as video encoder/decoders and digital signal processors, enabling these custom devices to be driven from and integrated closely with the OpenCL framework;
 
• DX9 Media Surface Sharing - enables efficient sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 9 or DXVA media surfaces;
 
• DX11 Surface Sharing - for seamless sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 11 surfaces.

Working Group Member Support
“AMD promotes industry standards like OpenCL 1.2 that encourage developer freedom and creativity,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program. “In addition to being one of the leading contributors to the OpenCL working group and specifications, AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and GPUs are the perfect platforms to take advantage of the potential of OpenCL – for developers and end-users.”

“Having worked with our Khronos partners in the evolution of OpenCL we are pleased to support the announcement of the latest version of the standard," said James McNiven, vice president, compute sub-systems, processor division, ARM.  “We believe the vision of energy efficient heterogeneous compute subsystems can only be realized through industry collaboration and standards. ARM remains committed to supporting OpenCL across both CPU and GPU technology and helping our partners deliver high-performance compute systems that leverage ARM® Mali™ GPU and Cortex™ processor technology.”

“Intel is encouraged by the progress of the OpenCL specification and proud to be an OpenCL adopter and contributor to the OpenCL 1.2 release”, said Bill Savage, vice president and general manager of the Developer Products Division of Intel’s Software and Services Group. “OpenCL 1.2 promises better performance and more flexibility in software design for developers targeting current and future Intel Platforms.”

“The existence of an unified programming interface for multi-core platforms is becoming a crucial element for boosting the productivity of software engineers.” said Satoshi Miki, Founder and CEO, Fixstars Corporation. “With the release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, I am very excited for the increased flexibility that it brings to multi-core programming. My hope is for many hardware vendors to support this new specification to allow for further innovations that can only come about from taking full advantage of the multi-core architecture.”

OpenCL Session at SC11, Seattle November 14-18th 2011
There is an OpenCL BOF “Birds of a Feather” Meeting on Wednesday 16th, 5:30– 7PM in Room TCC 101 at SC11, where attendees are invited to meet OpenCL implementers and developers and learn more about the new OpenCL 1.2 specification.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL are trademarks and WebCL is a certification mark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

The Khronos Group is pleased to invite Universities and Training Centers to Submit Open Course Content for Free KITE

The Khronos™ Group www.khronos.org, maintainers of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenCL™, WebGL™ and many other universal graphics, parallel computing and mutlimedia APIs for over 10 years, is very excited to extend this formal invitation to you for early participation in our soon-to-be-announced KITE initiative.

Khronos standards have existed for over a decade and we are proud to begin the next steps in outreach – education.

KITE is a cooperative effort between the Khronos Group, its individual members and worldwide educational institutions to provide free, web-based resources and Wiki hosting of Khronos-approved educational materials for teachers and students. We are building a repository of open courseware from universities and colleges worldwide and invite your participation.

Designed to facilitate communications and enable project collaboration between educators, students, researchers and Khronos Group members, KITE will offer reference materials and coursework covering all of the Khronos Group programming solutions, including its acclaimed OpenGL family of desktop and mobile 3D graphics APIs, OpenCL heterogeneous computing, OpenMAX™ multimedia frameworks and many more.

Due to your involvement as a leading member of the web community of CG educators, professionals and companies we offer you this early opportunity to become join us in this exciting initiative. We are pleased to offer marketing resources to publicize your involvement in KITE when we launch in a few weeks. Let us know if you are interested.

Thank you in advance for your consideration and we hope you choose to participate in this exciting education initiative.

Benefits to Educators

Educator benefits will include:

• free online listings in the KITE directory as well as sharing open courseware
• a reduction in necessary prep time for Khronos-related materials
• peer-reviewed courseware from colleagues
• sharing real-world teaching experiences
• leveraging of Khronos members to find industry placements
• internships and sale prices on premium courseware

While all teaching institutions are invited to submit content for review (and if approved to have upload and sharing privileges), a teaching institution must be a Khronos Academic Member to receive enhanced promotion of their coursework and to have access to the “behind the scenes” communications on the KITE website.

Benefits to Students

Students all over the world will have access to a wide range of resources, including

• “Study Hall” with industry materials and forums for courseware discussions with lecturers
• “The Quad” for online meet-ups for students to discuss projects and news
• a notice board to find internships, competitions and projects offered by Khronos Members
• “Roving Reporter” opportunities to report back on industry activities and to share demo videos and interviews.

Details on Course Content Submissions

If you have course content, reference materials, and/or presentations and are willing to help us build a world-class facility to share this with others interested or involved in open standards, please contact:

Ilana Welch
Gold Standard Group
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with 
Release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification

New open API specification available immediately; Developer feedback integrated into wide-ranging performance and functionality enhancements

August 8th, 2011 – Vancouver, SIGGRAPH 2011 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.2 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface).  OpenGL 4.2 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification while maintaining full backwards compatibility - enabling applications to incrementally use new features, while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.

The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language.  The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance.  The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

New functionality in the OpenGL 4.2 specification includes:

 
• enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture.  These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
 
• capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
 
• modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
 
• packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced  memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

“OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. “As with previous OpenGL releases NVIDIA is committed to ship productized implementations as rapidly as possible after specification release. In fact, NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs.” (Note: for more information, please visit http://developer.nvidia.com/opengl).
 
“AMD plans to release our OpenGL 4.2 beta drivers with the publication of the OpenGL 4.2 specification,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, AMD Software Development (NYSE: AMD). “AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences.”

Learn about OpenGL 4.2 and Khronos APIs at SIGGRAPH 2011 BOF Meetings

API	Date	Time	Location
WebGL	Wed, August 10th	10AM - Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
OpenCL	Wed, August 10th	1:30PM - 3:30PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL	Wed, Aug 10th	4PM - 6PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL ES/Mobile	Thu, Aug 11th	10AM-Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
COLLADA	Thu, Aug 11th	2PM - 4PM	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)

Visit Khronos at booth #663 and Khronos Press & Educators Open House at booth #764 to see Khronos members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

StreamInput creating open standard for advanced sensor processing; WebCL defining companion API to WebGL to bring parallel computation to the Web

August 8th, 2011 – Vancouver, SIGGRAPH 2011 – In its 10th year of operation the Khronos™ Group today widened its call for participation in its two newest working groups: StreamInput™ and WebCL™.  StreamInput is defining a cross-platform API for advanced sensor processing and user interaction, and WebCL is creating JavaScript bindings to OpenCL™ to enable heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 Web browsers.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of specifications and gain early access to draft standards before public release for any Khronos working group.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or by emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

The Khronos StreamInput working group is driving industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to enable applications to discover and use new generation sensors to create sophisticated user interactions.  The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling advanced sensors such as depth cameras, touch screens and motion and orientation sensors as well as traditional input devices.  StreamInput will provide flexible device discovery to enable an application to select and process high-level semantic input from low-level device capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers while simplifying portable application development. The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.  More information on StreamInput is here: http://www.khronos.org/streaminput/.

The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing.  WebCL will enable Web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games.  WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.  More information about WebCL, including links to prototype open source implementations from Nokia and Samsung, is here: http://www.khronos.org/webcl/.

“Advances in computational power on a wide range of platforms and devices are greatly accelerating sensor innovation from 9-axis motion positional sensors, to depth ranging cameras.  StreamInput will drive the market adoption of advanced sensors by enabling input fusion innovation under a common API that provides portability to application developers,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “WebCL is the natural extension of the WebGL and OpenCL work already underway at Khronos and continues the trend of evolving HTML5 not only to support advanced Web experiences but also to become a full-fledged application platform with access to advanced device capabilities.”

“AMD is highly supportive of the WebCL initiative to deliver compute capabilities to Web browsing,” said Suki Samra, Senior Director, Design Engineering (NYSE: AMD). “AMD strongly supports industry standards, and as a leading provider of OpenCL and OpenGL solutions on AMD’s GPUs and APUs believes that WebCL will be a welcome companion to the newly released WebGL standard.”

“We are delighted the Nokia initiative to standardize WebCL has been accepted by Khronos. The developer feedback about our WebCL prototype for Firefox has been positive, and we are committed to work with the open-source community to align it with the developing WebCL standard “, says Jyri Huopaniemi, director, media technologies, Nokia Research Center.

“SoftKinetic is excited to contribute to this standard initiative which will facilitate the adoption of new input devices such as depth sensing cameras.  It is important to facilitate content developer’s workflow as much as possible by abstracting these devices behind a robust and standard API", said Erik Krzeslo, chief strategy officer. "SoftKinetic products will greatly benefit from all what Stream Input offers in terms of simplicity, portability and cross-sensors interactions.”

Learn about Khronos APIs at SIGGRAPH 2011 BOF Meetings

API	Date	Time	Location
WebGL	Wed, August 10th	10AM - Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
OpenCL	Wed, August 10th	1:30PM - 3:30PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL	Wed, Aug 10th	4PM - 6PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL ES/Mobile	Thu, Aug 11th	10AM-Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
COLLADA	Thu, Aug 11th	2PM - 4PM	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)

About The Khronos Group
  The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos to Create New Open Standard for 
Advanced Device and Sensor Input

12th April, 2011 – San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group today announced a new initiative to create an open, platform-independent, royalty-free standard for accessing a wide diversity of advanced input devices including depth cameras, motion-tracking sensors, touch-screens and haptic devices.  In response to requests and proposals from multiple members, Khronos has created a ‘StreamInput’ working group that TransGaming Inc. has offered to initially chair.  This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process aiming for a first public release within 12 months.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The StreamInput working group will commence work during April 2011.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

The Khronos StreamInput working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to provide applications with both high-level semantic input as well as low-level device management capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers - while simplifying portable application development. The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling new generation sensors and traditional input devices such as keyboards, mice, track pads and joysticks.  The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.

"The StreamInput working group already has a strong variety of supporters both inside and outside of Khronos, and we hope that many other companies will join us to help build a lasting standard that can be broadly adopted across multiple devices and market segments," said Gavriel State, founder and CTO at TransGaming Inc.  "TransGaming has extensive experience in handling diverse input devices across many platforms – we have brought our real-world experience to bear on initiating a general input solution that will benefit the entire industry."

"Natural and intuitive human-machine interfaces, in particular using 3D depth sensing and gesture recognition technologies, are rapidly being adopted by developers and customers in consumer electronics and professional markets," said Eric Krzeslo, chief strategy officer at Softkinetic. "Softkinetic has been a pioneer in that space and welcomes Khronos’ initiative to standardize common APIs across the natural interface continuum and traditional interfaces, to give developers a solid foundation for building re-usable applications. We look forward to bring our experience in 3D cameras hardware, 3D gesture recognition software, and applications to this initiative."

"Input devices now range from simple keyboards, through 9-axis motion positional sensors, to depth ranging cameras with sophisticated image processing.  A robust input API is essential to drive the market adoption of advanced sensors by enabling input fusion innovation under a common API that provides portability to application developers," said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. "This initiative will also enable advanced applications such as augmented reality that need to process and synchronize multiple sensors for a truly seamless end-user experience."

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.