The Khronos Group announce Heterogeneous Computing Initiative

Tuesday 17th June 2008, 11:15:00 PM, written by Rys

The Khronos Group, an organised collection of interested parties that collaborate to push and develop open standards for certain classes of computing, have announced what they call the Heterogeneous Computing Initiative.

The hand-waving impetus behind the initiative is to create a set of open standards behind the idea of task and data parallel computing, via what they're calling the Compute Working Group.  The heterogenous part comes from the execution of the same codes on both CPUs and GPUs.

The Compute Working Group has initial membership from the likes of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ImgTec, Nokia, Apple, 3DLabs, ARM, Freescale, TI and Qualcomm (we highlighted the discrete and embedded GPU guys on purpose, sorry to those on the list in the PR that we've not namechecked here).  OpenCL is laid out as the focal point of the group for the time being, as the industry gets behind it, and representatives of the companies mentioned will be at SIGGRAPH to talk about the Compute Working Group, OpenCL and related topics.

The announcement is a big deal, and we'll cover it in a bit more depth in the near future.  Until then, you can read the press release, and the forums are getting warmed up with discussion as you read this.

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

b3d ± khronos, group, compute, working, opencl, opengl, heterogenous, gpu, cpu

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