For those wondering what the buzz was about earlier this month when there was word of a high quality GPU compression codec going open-source, details on that have now been revealed.

Unicode 13 is now officially available with standardizing 143,859 different characters.

Compression experts Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt with their Binomial consulting firm are about to release a high-quality open-source compression codec for GPUs.

While the cross-distribution AppStream specification standardizes the software component metadata for use by Linux software centers/stores, it turns out many open-source developers aren't interested in or time limited by learning the spec and maintaining the metadata. As such, Matthias Klumpp has now developed the MetaInfo Creator for easily creating this important cross-distro metadata for packages.

Khronos announced last year they would be looking to pursue an analytic rendering API and following the evaluation they have decided to move it forward.

Announced last March was Monado as an open-source implementation of OpenXR, the Khronos standard for AR/VR. Today marks the first release of Monado as version 0.1 so while it's still early on it is showing much progress.

The Khronos Group has been expanding into a lot of new areas in recent times from OpenXR to 3D Commerce to NNEF and now forming an exploratory group for creating an analytic rendering API.

It's a busy day in the royalty-free API space.

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones.

Based off AMD's GPUOpen HIP as part of their ROCm stack, researchers at Tampere University in Finland have created HIPCL as leveraging HIP as well as POCL for routing CUDA codes to run on any hardware supporting OpenCL+SPIR-V.

As expected after Intel provided Thunderbolt 3 to the USB Promoter Group royalty-free earlier this year, the USB 4.0 "USB4" specification was published today and indeed based on the Thunderbolt protocol specification.

The Khronos Group has posted their material from the SIGGRAPH 2019 graphics conference and includes some interesting updates on Vulkan and their ongoing efforts.

The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 2.2-11 specification to address various issues with the existing OpenCL specification while the next major release as "OpenCL-Next" is likely still a number of months away.

Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0.

With SIGGRAPH 2019 happening next week in LA, The Khronos Group has already kicked off the news cycle by making several announcements from forming a 3D Commerce Initiative Working Group to releasing new WebGL extensions to making use of Binomial's Basis Universal tech for better compression.

Zstd 1.4.1 is out today as a maintenance release to Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm but with this update comes even more performance optimizations.

The first release candidate of Samba 4.11 is now available while Samba 4.12 begins development on Git master.

VESA announced their first major update to the DisplayPort interface in three years.

The UEFI Forum today announced the release of the UEFI 2.8 specification.

Well, here's a surprise... EA (yes, Electronic Arts) has joined The Khronos Group as a contributing member.

Just days after the most recent POCL 1.3 release candidate, the Portable Computing Language 1.3 release is now officially available for an open-source project allowing OpenCL kernels to be executed on CPUs.

We knew it was coming and now it's been made official: the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has formally become a Linux Foundation project.

During this week's Game Developers Conference was the usual Khronos Dev Day where Vulkan, WebGL, glTF, and OpenXR took center stage. During the Vulkan State of the Union some details on their future endeavors were covered.

Last year we were expecting The Khronos Group to introduce OpenXR 1.0 for this standard to address fragmentation and provide interoperability in the VR space followed by AR. That debut last year didn't happen although they did show off the first demonstration at SIGGRAPH. This week though at GDC they are announcing the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification release.

The AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) appears solid now with it having been promoted to version 1.0.0.

The ISO C++ committee has wrapped up its winter meeting in Hawaii that also served as the last meeting for approving new features for the upcoming C++20 revision to the C++ programming language.

While "OpenCL-Next" will hopefully be on track for releasing later this year as the next big update to OpenCL, OpenCL 2.2-10 was released today by The Khronos Group as the latest maintenance update to the nearly two year old OpenCL 2.2 specification.

There still is two months to go until the annual Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco while on Wednesday, The Khronos Group published their initial sessions for their developer day during the highly anticipated event.

When it comes to being able to run OpenCL kernels on CPUs, the main option at this point for Linux systems is POCL as the Portable Computing Language. While POCL 1.2 was released just this past September, we're still very much looking forward to the upcoming POCL 1.3 release with more improvements for this portable OpenCL 1.2~2.0 implementation.

From VR to autonomous vehicles to edge computing, The Khronos Group continues working on new industry standards for today's expanding compute landscape. Today the organization announced they are soliciting industry feedback and creating an exploratory group for a new, open industry standard around High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC).