Khronos announces OpenCL 1.0 specification

OpenCL has officially arrived. At the opening day of Siggraph Asia 2008 the Khronos Group has officially announced the OpenCL 1.0 Specification.

The latest development puts the GPGPU on firm and level footing. OpenCL 1.0 will provide an open source, royalty free APU for all platforms.

OpenCL combined with the push from nVidia and ATi should help to realize more parallel computing tasks running on the GPU in the future.

Read more at Theo Valich's Blog here.

The Official OpenCL site is here.

This specification covers all GPGPU-capable hardware, regardless of that hardware being in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks or handhelds - if your GPU is able to compute, the manufacturer only needs to adopt OpenCL support in the driver and that's that.

That should not be an issue, with AMD/ATI and Nvidia strongly standing behind the standard. Computing engineers on both sides bickered about Brooke+, CAL or CUDA in the past, but both makers are firmly behind OpenCL as the way for the future.

So far, companies that developed and ratified this initial spec include 3Dlabs, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, BARCO, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umea University.