Khronos Releases SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification

The Khronos Group has announced the provisional specification of SYCL 2020 as the newest version of this higher-level programming model originally designed for OpenCL that is based on pure single-source C++.

The SYCL 2020 provisional specification is available today and is now based on C++17 where as formerly SYCL had been based on C++11. SYCL 2020 is also bringing new programming abstractions like unified shared memory, group algorithms, sub-groups, and other features.

SYCL 2020 still supports OpenCL as the default back-end target but there continues to be new implementations for supporting SYCL on more accelerator targets (CPUs, OpenMP, CUDA, Radeon ROCm, etc) and other environments for heterogeneous programming. There is already early SYCL 2020 support coming to Intel's DPC++ compiler for oneAPI and Codeplay's ComputeCpp project.

More details on the SYCL 2020 provisional specification at Khronos.org.