Legit Reviews

June 14th 2010 - Beaverton, OR – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and
public release of the OpenCL™ 1.1 specification, the latest version of the open, royalty-free 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 working group members
include: AMD, Apple, ARM, Blizzard Activision, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson,
Freescale, Graphic Remedy, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Kestrel Institute, Los Alamos
National Laboratory, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, Petapath, Presagis, Qualcomm, Renesas, S3 Graphics,
Seaweed Systems, Sony, ST-Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Symbian, and Texas Instruments. Today
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 OpenCL 1.1 specifications, online reference
pages and reference cards are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

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

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.

Quotes from Working Group Members

“The release of OpenCL 1.1 is coming at a perfect time, capitalizing on the rapidly growing interest
in GPU computing across the industry,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, Fusion
Experience Program, AMD. “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.”

“ARM is committed to supporting OpenCL across a range of its products,” said Pete Hutton, vice
president technology and systems, Processor Division, ARM. “OpenCL 1.1 builds on the momentum
of OpenCL and will accelerate innovation in high-performance compute systems containing GPUs,
CPUs and other devices by ARM Partners.”

“Intel is a strong supporter of open industry standards that create developer choice and foster
innovation,” said Elliot Garbus, vice president Intel Software and Services Group and general
manager Visual Computing Software Division. “As a contributor to the OpenCL 1.1 specification,
Intel is encouraged by its evolution as a programming model and excited about the promise of
OpenCL to offer developers flexibility and the power to harness future parallel processing on Intel
platforms.”

“Graphic Remedy is proud to be part of the Khronos OpenCL group. We believe that OpenCL is
becoming the leading API for the creation of parallel computing applications, which will increase
demand for robust debugging and profiling tools,” said Avi Shapira, CEO at Graphic Remedy.
“Graphic Remedy is committed to supporting the OpenCL developer community with gDEBugger CL,
the new OpenCL Debugger, Profiler and Memory analyzer; this solution will help companies and
individuals make the most out of the parallel computing power exposed by current and future
hardware.”

“The use of heterogeneous parallel processing to transform computing in fields such as
entertainment, science and industry is a trend that shows no signs of slowing, thanks to the wide
range of tools that developers have at their disposal today,” said Sanford Russell, general manager
of GPU Computing at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA’s full weight is behind OpenCL 1.1, as evidenced by
immediate availability of the driver on our website today, along with the industry’s broadest set of
tools for taking advantage of NVIDIA GPUs for general purpose computation.”

Khronos OpenCL Members Speak and Demo at SIGGRAPH Los Angeles July 27-29, 2010
Members of the press and developers alike are invited to attend the BOF “Birds of a Feather” on
Tuesday, 27 July, 2010 from 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm at the SIGGRAPH trade show at Los Angeles
Convention Center, Room 402A. There the audience will meet designers and implementers of this
significant standard for heterogeneous parallel programming on GPUs and CPUs, and learn how
OpenCL inter-operates with OpenGL, enabling advanced, cross-platform, visual computing
applications. Guests are also invited to view demos on the Khronos booth #1201 and pickup a free
laminated reference card for a number of our APIs, including OpenCL and OpenGL. See more about
Khronos Group at SIGGRAPH: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/deta ... h-la-2010/