OpenCL 1.1 to accelerate parallel programming

BEAVERTON, ORE: The Khronos Group, an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media, recently announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.1 specification, the latest version of the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors.

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"The clear commercial opportunity to unleash the power of heterogeneous parallel processing that drove multiple OpenCL 1.0 implementations has also fueled the ongoing industry cooperation to create OpenCL 1.1," said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA.

OpenCL 1.1 provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation between industry-leading companies, said a press release.

OpenCL working group members include, AMD, Apple, ARM, Blizzard Activision, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, Graphic Remedy, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Kestrel Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, Petapath, Presagis, Qualcomm, Renesas, S3 Graphics, Seaweed Systems, Sony, ST-Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Symbian, and Texas Instruments.

"The OpenCL 1.1 specification is being released 18 months after OpenCL 1.0 to enable programmers to take even more effective advantage of parallel computing resources while protecting their existing investment in OpenCL code."

"The release of OpenCL 1.1 is coming at a perfect time, capitalizing on the rapidly growing interest in GPU computing across the industry," said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Fusion Experience Program, AMD.

"AMD believes that to spur this growth and reassure ISVs and the software development community that they will get the maximum market potential for their products, it is critical for vendors to embrace a multi-vendor, multi-source interface and an industry standard programming model.”

Elliot Garbus, vice president Intel Software and Services Group and general manager Visual Computing Software Division added that Intel is a strong supporter of open industry standards that create developer choice and foster innovation.

He further said added, “ As a contributor to the OpenCL 1.1 specification, Intel is encouraged by its evolution as a programming model and excited about the promise of OpenCL to offer developers flexibility and the power to harness future parallel processing on Intel platforms."

The  Khronos Group also announced the release of a C++ wrapper API for use with OpenCL, and the immediate availability of OpenCL 1.1 conformance tests.