Khronos Unveils OpenCL 2.2, SPIR-V 1.2, OpenCL CTS Open-Sourced

There are some exciting Khronos announcements this morning, including more open-source greatness!

First up, Khronos has officially released OpenCL 2.2. OpenCL 2.2 is firmed up and ready to go for your cross-vendor, GPGPU computing needs. OpenCL 2.2 supports the new OpenCL C++ kernel language, which makes C++ a first-class kernel language now alongside C. The OpenCL C++ language is a sub-set of the C++14 standard.

Also new to OpenCL 2.2 is pipe storage as a device-side type aimed for FPGA implementations.

Today's SPIR-V 1.2 release adds support for run-time specialization of key tuning parameters in OpenCL 2.2. Also out today is SYCL 2.2 to match the capabilities of OpenCL's 2.2 C++ specification.

Khronos has also confirmed the possibility of merging OpenCL with the Vulkan API. Vulkan already offers compute capabilities and with both of these APIs making use of the SPIR-V intermediate representation, they are still exploring the possibility of merging these graphics and compute interfaces into a single API.

Aside from these specification updates, also exciting is that the Khronos Group has posted the OpenCL specifications to GitHub and has also open-sourced their conformance tests. Khronos previously open-sourced their Vulkan and OpenGL conformance tests while now OpenCL is seeing similar treatment with having the conformance tests available to everyone as open-source rather than just Khronos members. The conformance tests being opened up today are for OpenCL 1.2, 2.0, and 2.1 while more releases are coming.

The public and open availability of the OpenCL CTS should help independent contributors working on open implementations like Clover, POCL, Beignet, and ROCm while of course the contributors from the likes of Intel and AMD have already had CTS access under their Khronos membership.

With the embargo just expiring right now, you should be able to learn more shortly at Khronos.org.