The Khronos Group, a consortium creating open standards, has announced the ratification and public release of OpenCL1.1 specification, a new version of the open standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors.
The consortium said that OpenCL 1.1 provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification. Khronos also released C++ wrapper API for use with OpenCL.
According to Khronos, the new offering includes new data types including 3-component vectors and additional image formats; handles commands from multiple hosts and processing buffers across multiple devices; and operations on regions of a buffer including read, write and copy of 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular regions.
In addition, OpenCL 1.1 offers 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; and improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events.
Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at Nvidia, said: ‘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."
