---

The open technology in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that allows devs to tap the vast computing power in current graphics processing units (GPU) and use it for any application has gotten a big bump. The Khronos Group has announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.1 specification.

“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, president, Khronos Group and vice president, 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 offers the following enhancements:

• 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

See also: OpenCL in Snow Leopard

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.