The Khronos Group on Monday announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.1 specification, the latest version of the open standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. 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.

OpenCL 1.1 adds significant functionality for enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance including:

• New data types including 3-component vectors and additional image formats;
• Handling commands from multiple hosts and processing buffers across multiple devices;
• Operations on regions of a buffer including read, write and copy of 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular regions;
• Enhanced use of events to drive and control command execution;
• Additional OpenCL C built-in functions such as integer clamp, shuffle and asynchronous strided copies;
• Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events.

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

“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. 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,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at Nvidia.

“The release of OpenCL 1.1 is coming at a perfect time, capitalizing on the rapidly growing interest in GPU computing across the industry. 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.  As one of the most committed supporters of OpenCL through our ATI Stream software development kit, AMD is poised to unleash the true potential of application acceleration with our AMD Fusion Family of APUs, scheduled for release in 2011.  These APUs are designed to support OpenCL on both the GPU and the CPU, thereby providing an unmatched heterogeneous computing platform,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president of Fusion Experience Program at AMD.

Tags: Khronos, OpenCL, GPGPU