Standards News Archives

On top of an exciting Vulkan spec update out today, The Khronos Group has announced the Slang Initiative based on NVIDIA's open-source Slang compiler code.

In addition to the release today of OpenMP 6.0 ahead of the SC24 supercomputing conference in Atlanta, over at The Khronos Group they have provided an update on upcoming SYCL improvements to benefit high performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing applications.

With all the craze around "AI" and hoping to foster more open-source AI models, the Linux Foundation has welcomed the Open Model Initiative (OMI) into its umbrella of open-source initiatives to help foster high quality, openly-licensed AI models.

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.

Last year it was announced that Intel's oneAPI software initiative evolved into the UXL Foundation for making compute accelerators more open as well as opening things up to more cross-vendor collaboration and adoption. Intel started the Unified Acceleration Foundation with the Linux Foundation, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Announced today is that the UXL Foundation has begun collaborating with The Khronos Group.

It's rare for an advanced media briefing to involve representatives from both AMD and Intel, but that happened yesterday. AMD and Intel along with Broadcom have formed the Ultra Accelerator Link "UALink" as a new open standard they are hoping to use to take on NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink interface.

The Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders like Intel, Red Hat, Hugging Face, MariaDB, Cloudera, and others have launched the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA) as a new enterprise AI collaborative effort.

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices.

OpenCL 3.0 debuted back in 2020 and while we haven't heard talks of any major revision on the horizon, it does continue to see new point releases. Released on Thursday was OpenCL 3.0.16 that adds one new extension while finalizing eight formerly provisional extensions.

Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3.

The newest frontier by the Linux Foundation is getting involved with coming up with a formal file format specification for Lottie, the vector graphics animation format based on JSON.

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems.

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI.

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs.

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API.

OpenCL 3.0.14 has been released that has a few minor fixes/corrections plus one prominent new extension: cl_khr_command_buffer_multi_device.

The SYCL single-source C++ based programming model has begun taking off with Intel investing in it heavily as part of their oneAPI / DPC++ compiler stack and a variety of different open-source projects bringing SYCL to the likes of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, CPU-based OpenMP implementations, SYCL to Vulkan, and more for heterogeneous compute needs. The Khronos Group announced today they have begun working on SYCL SC as a safety-critical variant of this heterogeneous compute programming model.

Autonomous driving technology company Mobileye has contributed to The Khronos Group an open-source OpenCL tensor and tiling library.

The past few years there has been hipSYCL as an open-source project for not only taking SYCL codes to Radeon ROCm with HIP but also NVIDIA CUDA and other targets. The hipSYCL project has now decided to rename itself to Open SYCL to reflect its broader focus on supporting CPUs and GPUs from all major vendors and not being limited to just AMD's HIP interface.

PoCL 3.1 is out today as the newest feature update to the "Portable Computing Language" that is effectively a portable OpenCL implementation that originally began focused on being a CPU-based implementation of OpenCL and has grown to support additional back-end drivers via LLVM for targeting NVIDIA CUDA, an experimental Vulkan driver, and other accelerator targets.

The Khronos Group that is known as the standards body behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, OpenXR, and other industry APIs announced that their next API will be called Kamaros.

The USB Implementers Forum on Tuesday announced the USB4 v2.0 specification that allows USB transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps over USB Type-C connections.

VESA today announced the publishing of the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. As a pleasant change, VESA has been working behind the scenes to see that all DisplayPort 2.0 certified products are actually forward-compatible with this more strict DisplayPort 2.1 specification.

The Khronos Group has published OpenCL 3.0.12 as the newest version of this API for compute across heterogeneous platforms, but mostly known for GPU compute.

The CXL Consortium today announced the Compute Express Link 3.0 specification that doubles the data rate of CXL 2.0 to 64 GT/s while introducing no added latency.

It was on this day in 1992 that Silicon Graphics (SGI) released OpenGL to the world.

The PCI SIG today announced the PCI Express 7.0 specification that doubles the data rate to 128 GT/s and should be released to members in 2025.

PoCL 3.0 has been formally released today for this portable OpenCL implementation that supports execution on CPUs or other back-ends by way of LLVM such as for targeting AMD HSA, NVIDIA GPUs, and other accelerators. With PoCL 3.0 comes initial OpenCL 3.0 support while the actual conformance results are still pending.

Since 2020 the Vulkan API has offered a fragment shading rate extension for allowing games to provide higher levels of detail in a scene compared to other less important areas of the screen. Desktop OpenGL has also offered a fragment shading rate extension while this week a similar extension has been added for OpenGL ES.

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support.

Overnight a new minor revision to the OpenCL 3.0 specification was published.

VESA this morning announced an open standard and certification program around variable refresh rate (VRR) performance for AdaptiveSync displays for gaming and also around MediaSync for media playback performance.

WebAssembly as the W3C standard for a portable binary-code format for executable programs on the web and elsewhere continues seeing exciting new use-cases for speedy web applications and even desktop purposes. This open standard continues advancing though and the first public working drafts of WebAssembly 2.0 were published today.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium was announced today for fostering an open chiplet ecosystem for future generations of hardware.

In recent years The Khronos Group has been expanding a lot and forming a number of new open industry standards around 3D commerce, analytics rendering, and more. The latest is Khronos now establishing a Camera API working group.

While PCIe 5.0 adoption is only in its infancy, the PCI-SIG today announced the PCIe 6.0 specification.

OpenCL 3.0.10 has been tagged as the newest revision to the OpenCL 3.0 API.

The Khronos Group this morning is rolling out the provisional specification for ANARI 1.0, its newest royalty-free, industry-standard API.

It's been six years already since VESA published the Embedded DisplayPort 1.4b specification while finally it's been succeeded by eDP 1.5.

Last Friday night we spotted OpenCL 3.0.9 with several new extensions included. Today The Khronos Group is formally announcing these latest OpenCL additions focused on Vulkan interoperability as well as neural network inferencing.

The Khronos Group's OpenCL working group did a quiet Friday evening tagging of OpenCL 3.0.9.

The first release candidate of the forthcoming PoCL 1.8 "Portable Computing Language" implementation is now available for testing.

The W3C has been working on the "Open Screen Protocol" as part of their Second Screen Working Group. This effort has been about having a web standard so web pages can drive secondary screens to display web content. Unfortunately, the plans are currently being complicated by a number of software patents issued to Apple.

One of the most exciting Linux kernel innovations in recent years has been eBPF for an in-kernel virtual machine allowing sandboxed programs running within the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation along with Microsoft and other partners are now forming the eBPF Foundation.

The Khronos Group recently released a new minor point release to the OpenCL 3.0 specification.

The latest JavaScript API to see a public working draft out of the W3C is for a Web Neural Network API.

The W3C has promoted the Web Audio API to now being an official standard as a JavaScript API for creating and manipulating audio content directly within web browsers.

When it comes to new specifications/certifications from The Khronos Group for royalty-free open standards we are used to very low-level interfaces with exciting innovations like Vulkan and glTF but today they are doing something rather different and announcing a 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program.

NVM Express Inc today published NVMe 2.0 as a family/library of specifications rather than being a monolithic specification in order to allow them to advance faster and independently of each other.