OpenCL 3.0 Specification Released With New Khronos Open-Source OpenCL SDK

Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK.

The OpenCL 3.0 specification is now official, OpenCL 3.0 Conformance Tests are also now available, and the resources are on GitHub for interested developers. OpenCL 3.0 remains largely about making OpenCL 2 features optional so OpenCL 3.0 is suited for more devices and environments but also adds new extensions around being able to obtain a UUID on a given OpenCL driver/device and also asynchronous DMA capabilities. Async DMA support should help OpenCL 3.0 work for embedded processors.

OpenCL 1.2 applications should be able to run unchanged on OpenCL 3.0 drivers/devices. OpenCL 2.x software can also run on OpenCL 3.0 implementations assuming the driver supports all CL2 features used by the application.

The new OpenCL SDK maintained by The Khronos Group incorporates the OpenCL C headers, C++ bindings, OpenCL loader, and OpenCL utility library along with code samples and documentation.

More details on the finalized OpenCL 3.0 via Khronos.org.

In making OpenCL 2.x features optional like SVM, NVIDIA's proprietary driver should finally be moving on from OpenCL 1.2 into OpenCL 3.0 compliance soon. For Linux users the initial OpenCL 3.0 implementation right now is Intel's open-source Compute Runtime that supports OpenCL 3.0 for Tiger Lake / Xe Graphics today while they will be flipping on OpenCL 3.0 for previous generations very soon.