The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.0 specification, the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 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 Umeå University. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available at http://www.khronos.org/opencl/.

OpenCL enables software developers to take full advantage of a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). OpenCL consists of an API for coordinating parallel computation and a programming language for specifying those computations. Specifically, the OpenCL standard defines:

* a subset of the C99 programming language with extensions for parallelism;
* an API for coordinating data and task-based parallel computation across a wide range of heterogeneous processors;
* numerical requirements based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ IEEE 754 standard;
* efficient interoperability with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and other graphics APIs.

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Related Links
The OpenCL Specification 1.0
cl.h - OpenCL 1.0 Header File
cl_gl.h - OpenCL 1.0 OpenGL Integration Header File
cl_platform.h - OpenCL 1.0 Platform-Dependent Macros

Apple-proposed OpenCL 1.0 ratified for GPU computing