Early OpenCL 2.0 Specification Brings New Features

Besides publishing the OpenGL 4.4 specification today, the Khronos Group also published their provisional draft of the OpenCL 2.0 specification for GPGPU comptuing. OpenCL 2.0 brings several new compute-focused features over OpenCL 1.2.

OpenCL 2.0 is set to provide an enhanced execution model, a subset of the C11 and C++11 memory models, synchronization, and atomic operations. The CL 2.0 provisional specification is out for public review and should be ratified within the next six months.

Other OpenCL 2.0 features include shared virtual memory for host and device kernels, dynamic parallelism capabilties, a generic address space, improved support for sRGB and 3D images, Pipes, and an Android Installable Client Driver Extension.

Also announced today from SIGGRAPH 2013 was the OpenCL SPIR 1.2 provisional specification. The Khronos SPIR is about a generic intermediate representation for OpenCL device programs.

More details on OpenCL 2.0 can be found within the Khronos press release.