News

OpenCL 1.2 specifications released

The Khronos Group has today announced the approval and release of the OpenCL 1.2 specifications, future successor to OpenCL 1.1, now approximately one year and a half old.

OpenCL is an open and royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors, which sees itself being given enhanced performances and functionalities as well as backwards compatible specifications thanks to the cooperation of over thirty industrial-leading companies.

Khronos has also updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to make sure that the implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development.

The specifications include:

Device partitioning – enabling applications to partition a device into sub-devices to directly control work assignment to particular compute units, reserve a part of the device for use for high priority/latency-sensitive tasks, or effectively use shared hardware resources such as a cache;
Separate compilation and linking of objects – providing the capabilities and flexibility of traditional compilers enabling the creation of libraries of OpenCL programs for other programs to link to;
Enhanced image support – including added support for 1D images and 1D & 2D image arrays. Also, the OpenGL sharing extension now enables an OpenCL image to be created from OpenGL 1D textures and 1D & 2D texture arrays;
Built-in kernels represent the capabilities of specialized or non-programmable hardware and associated firmware, such as video encoder/decoders and digital signal processors, enabling these custom devices to be driven from and integrated closely with the OpenCL framework;
DX9 Media Surface Sharing – enables efficient sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 9 or DXVA media surfaces;
DX11 Surface Sharing – for seamless sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 11 surfaces.

Much more details can be found directly from Khronos’s OpenCL Specification Document here.

Source