Standards News Archives

The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes.

The Portable Computing Language project is out today with PoCL 7.2 as this portable, MIT-licensed OpenCL implementation that runs across various CPU architectures as well as targeting other GPUs/hardware with LLVM back-ends. Notable with PoCL 7.2 is bringing official OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 and RISC-V processors.

The Linux Foundation hosted Open Programmable Infrastructure "OPI" announced its first coordinated release with OPI Abstraction v0.1. The work of the Open Programmable Infrastructure is hoping to standardize the data processing unit (DPU) and infrastructure processing unit (IPU) ecosystems.

Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 now has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver.

It's crazy realizing that glTF 2.0 is already nine years old for this API-neutral 3D runtime and asset delivery format. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group today extended that with the debut of glTF 2.1 as a backward-compatible revision to the specification.

As expected given AOM Video Model indications last week, the AV2 v1.0 specification was officially released on Friday.

Released earlier this month was the OpenCL 3.1 specification with a focus on enhancing AI and HPC workloads for this long-time Khronos specification. Out today is OpenCL 3.1.1 as a point release with an emphasis on addressing a possible performance regression of OpenCL 3.1.

The Flattened Image Tree "FIT" 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file.

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group.

Last year with the ACPI 6.6 specification release came revised Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) support for enhancing the capabilities around this standard for OS management of the performance of CPU cores using an abstract performance scale. That CPPC v4 support is now being worked on for the acpi_cppc Linux driver by NVIDIA engineers.

The embargo just lifted on an interesting new industry consortium... CoreCollective. The CoreCollective consortium is focused on open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem and to a large extent what Linaro has already been doing for the past decade and a half. Interestingly though with CoreCollective for open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem, AMD is now onboard as a founding member along with various other vendors.

While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0.

It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry.

Last month the Alliance for Open Media "AOMedia" began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year. They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1.

As announced last month, PCI Express 8.0 is aiming for 256 GT/s speeds for allowing 1 TB/s bandwidth in an x16 configuration. In working towards the goals of PCIe 8.0, the PCI-SIG announced today that the v0.3 specification has been released to members.

The PCI-SIG announced today the PCI Express 8.0 specification due out in 2028 will double the data of the PCI Express 7.0 specification, taking it to 256 GT/s.

The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.19 documentation as the latest specification for the OpenCL 3.0 compute API.

While WebP and AVIF generate much of the interest these days from a tech perspective for modern image formats, the PNG image format was just updated with new features.

PCI Express 7.0 was announced back in 2022 as coming in 2025 with 128 GT/s Since then draft specifications were published while today PCI-SIG is announcing the formal PCI Express 7.0 specification release along with a new PCIe Optical Interconnect Solution.

UALink as the open standard alternative to NVIDIA NVLink that is backed by Intel, AMD, and other vendors has published the UALink 200G 1.0 specification.

The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.18 specifications as the latest incremental update to OpenCL 3.0.

The full PCI Express 7.0 specification remains on track for publishing later this year while out today is version 0.9 of the specification as the planned final draft.

In addition to the HDMI Forum announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification for release in the first half of this year, VESA also took to CES 2025 to announce their forthcoming DisplayPort 2.1b standard.

The HDMI Forum used CES for today announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification that will be available to HDMI 2.x adopters in the first half of the calendar year.

On Tuesday the UEFI Forum released the UEFI 2.11 specification alongside the Platform Initialization (PI) 1.9 specification.

On top of an exciting Vulkan spec update out today, The Khronos Group has announced the Slang Initiative based on NVIDIA's open-source Slang compiler code.

In addition to the release today of OpenMP 6.0 ahead of the SC24 supercomputing conference in Atlanta, over at The Khronos Group they have provided an update on upcoming SYCL improvements to benefit high performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing applications.

As part of the Flash Memory Summit this week, the NVMe 2.1 specifications were published today including the NVMe 2.1 Base specification, Command Set specifications (NVM Command Set, ZNS Command Set, Key Value Command Set), Transport specifications (PCIe Transport, Fibre Channel Transport, RDMA Transport and TCP Transport) and the NVMe Management Interface specification.

Last year it was announced that Intel's oneAPI software initiative evolved into the UXL Foundation for making compute accelerators more open as well as opening things up to more cross-vendor collaboration and adoption. Intel started the Unified Acceleration Foundation with the Linux Foundation, Google, Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Announced today is that the UXL Foundation has begun collaborating with The Khronos Group.

It's rare for an advanced media briefing to involve representatives from both AMD and Intel, but that happened yesterday. AMD and Intel along with Broadcom have formed the Ultra Accelerator Link "UALink" as a new open standard they are hoping to use to take on NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink interface.

The Khronos Group on Monday released OpenXR 1.1 as the latest version of this industry standard for open, cross-platform development for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) devices.

OpenCL 3.0 debuted back in 2020 and while we haven't heard talks of any major revision on the horizon, it does continue to see new point releases. Released on Thursday was OpenCL 3.0.16 that adds one new extension while finalizing eight formerly provisional extensions.

Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3.

The newest frontier by the Linux Foundation is getting involved with coming up with a formal file format specification for Lottie, the vector graphics animation format based on JSON.

PoCL 5.0 has been officially released as the latest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that provides OpenCL support for CPU-based execution as well as various other LLVM-based hardware back-ends like for NVIDIA PTX and oneAPI Level Zero. With PoCL 5.0 is also a new experimental back-end for targeting OpenCL support distributed across networked systems.

The AI Alliance has launched as a consortium focused on advancing open, safe, and responsible AI.

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is known for their work on the AV1 video codec and AVIF image file format while now they have released their first royalty-free audio specification.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Consortium today published the UCe 1.1 specification for helping to standardize die-to-die connectivity with multi-die SoCs.

For several years now The Khronos Group has been developing the ANARI standard as an analytics rendering API and focusing on scalable 3D data virtualization. Today the ANARI 1.0 release finally took place for this cross-platform 3D rendering engine API.

OpenCL 3.0.14 has been released that has a few minor fixes/corrections plus one prominent new extension: cl_khr_command_buffer_multi_device.

The SYCL single-source C++ based programming model has begun taking off with Intel investing in it heavily as part of their oneAPI / DPC++ compiler stack and a variety of different open-source projects bringing SYCL to the likes of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, CPU-based OpenMP implementations, SYCL to Vulkan, and more for heterogeneous compute needs. The Khronos Group announced today they have begun working on SYCL SC as a safety-critical variant of this heterogeneous compute programming model.

Autonomous driving technology company Mobileye has contributed to The Khronos Group an open-source OpenCL tensor and tiling library.

The past few years there has been hipSYCL as an open-source project for not only taking SYCL codes to Radeon ROCm with HIP but also NVIDIA CUDA and other targets. The hipSYCL project has now decided to rename itself to Open SYCL to reflect its broader focus on supporting CPUs and GPUs from all major vendors and not being limited to just AMD's HIP interface.

PoCL 3.1 is out today as the newest feature update to the "Portable Computing Language" that is effectively a portable OpenCL implementation that originally began focused on being a CPU-based implementation of OpenCL and has grown to support additional back-end drivers via LLVM for targeting NVIDIA CUDA, an experimental Vulkan driver, and other accelerator targets.

The Khronos Group that is known as the standards body behind OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, OpenXR, and other industry APIs announced that their next API will be called Kamaros.

The USB Implementers Forum on Tuesday announced the USB4 v2.0 specification that allows USB transfer speeds up to 80 Gbps over USB Type-C connections.

VESA today announced the publishing of the DisplayPort 2.1 specification. As a pleasant change, VESA has been working behind the scenes to see that all DisplayPort 2.0 certified products are actually forward-compatible with this more strict DisplayPort 2.1 specification.

The Khronos Group has published OpenCL 3.0.12 as the newest version of this API for compute across heterogeneous platforms, but mostly known for GPU compute.

The CXL Consortium today announced the Compute Express Link 3.0 specification that doubles the data rate of CXL 2.0 to 64 GT/s while introducing no added latency.