Part of the Khronos Group

The Khronos Group - Media Authoring and Acceleration

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics

OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL 3.0 exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.

OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is the first open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. OpenCL provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code for high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices using a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as DSPs.

EGL - Native Platform Interface

EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.

COLLADA - Digital Asset and FX Exchange Schema

COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX

OpenGL SC - Safety Critical Profile

The open standard OpenGL® SC Safety Critical Profile is defined to meet the unique needs of the safety-critical market for avionics, industrial, military, medical and automotive applications including D0178-B certification. It simplifies safety-critical certification, guarantees repeatability, allows compliance with real-time requirements, and facilitates porting of legacy safety-critical applications.

OpenKODE - Khronos Open Development Environment

OpenKODE® is a royalty-free, open standard that combines a set of native APIs to increase source portability for rich media and graphics applications.  OpenKODE reduces mobile platform fragmentation by providing a cross-platform API for accessing operating system resources, and a media architecture for portable access to advanced mixed graphics acceleration.

OpenGL ES - The Standard for Embedded 3D Graphics

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics. OpenGL SC is tuned for the safety critical market.

OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration

OpenVG™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.

OpenMAX - The Standard for Media Library Portability

OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration

OpenSL ES™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.

Khronos News

MPEG finalized 3D Graphics Compression Model instantiated for COLLADA standard

January 05, 2009 MPEG finalized the standardization of the 3D Graphics Compression Model as a new part of the MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496-25 3D GCM). This specifies a generic architecture model able to connect compression tools developed by MPEG for 3D graphics primitives to any XML based representation of such primitives. Currently, the standard instantiates this model for three standards: XMT (ISO/IEC 14496-11), COLLADA (specified by Khronos Group), and X3D (ISO/IEC 19775:2004) by specifying the complete set of correspondences between the MPEG-4 compression tools and elements of these three standards. The new content obtained by such combination is packaged into an ISO file format that is able to carry in a lossless manner the data structure expressed in XML while reducing the size of the original file by 50:1 and supporting geometry, texture and animation streaming. The reference software implementation, publicly available under ISO license, covers both encoder and decoders. MPEG-4 for 3D Graphics becomes a transparent layer, optimally designed for storage and transmission, and independent of production and consumption conditions.
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Imagination Technologies Hiring Several OpenCL Engineers

December 23, 2008 Imagination Technology has several OpenCL job postings in the UK including OpenCL Compiler Senior Design Engineer, OpenCL Driver Design Engineer and OpenCL Compiler Design Engineer.
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Intelligraphics announces OpenGL ES and EGL courses in February 2009

December 23, 2008 Intelligraphics is pleased to announce a 5-day intensive OpenGL™ ES & EGL training course February 9th-13th 2009. This course is tailor-made with driver developers in mind primarily focusing on OpenGL™ v1.1 and ES v2.0 for embedded systems development. The course also presents EGL v1.3 concepts and programming for creating drawing surfaces and initializing contexts.
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Breaking speed record in COLLADA import/export

December 23, 2008 Sony and Intel are teaming together to provide better COLLADA export/import for Max and Maya. The German company Netallied has been working on a brand new implementation, and the result of this work is now available in Beta on sourceforge. The new exporters and importers are taking advantage of direct streaming exporters, and SAX XML parsing for importers. Importing a 60MB COLLADA file into 3dsMAX takes 1.8sec with the new SAX based approach, in comparison to the previous FCOLLADA based importer: 39.7sec.
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DAZ3D releases Carrera 7 Pro with COLLADA exporter

December 22, 2008 DAZ3D recently released Carrera 7 Pro. Carrara is recognized as a robust, versatile software package of 3D tools that includes modeling, rigging, animating, terrain-building, rendering, and more. New in this version is Multi-Pass Rendering, 3D Paint, Improved Content Support, UV Editing/Unfolding, and a COLLADA Export.
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Apple invests in ITG to boost strength of iPhone

December 18, 2008 Apple has purchased 8.2 million shares of Imagination Technologies Group (ITG) stock, giving Apple 3.6% ownership. ITG is the company behind the PowerVR MBX and PowerVR SGX and VXD. The SGX is compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0 which includes a shader engine for more realistic 3D graphics. The VXD capable of handling resolutions up to full HD resolution.
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Apple Planning Snow Leopard Surprise based on OpenCL?

December 18, 2008 The Guardian is reporting that Apple's next OS revision 'Snow Leopard' will likely have a couple of new technologies to speed up software, without the requirement of new hardware. One is called Grand Central, and repotedly makes better use of the Intel processors in the current line of Macs. The second technology, OpenCL, will offers radical change, as it harnesses the power of the GPU. OpenCL will allow an application to work on whatever GPU the machine contains, on the fly. This has progressed faster than expected, in part because Apple brought the problem to the Khronos Group.
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NEC System Technologies unveils new graphics IP supporting Adobe® Flash® Lite™ 3

December 18, 2008 NEC System Technologies, Ltd. today announced the launch of license sales of embedded graphics IP "GA88 Series/IWAYAG" achieving high function, high performance vector graphics conforming to the latest version OpenVG 1.1 for digital home appliances, car navigation systems and other visual display functions installed embedded devices. This supports FlashPlayer and Adobe Flash Lite 3.1.5 embedded by Adobe Systems Incorporated and enables 5x to 10x faster Flash contents playback speeds.
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Maemo.org pre-alpha version 5 SDK includes OpenMAX software component

December 17, 2008 Maemo.org has released a "pre-alpha" version of its Maemo 5 SDK. Based on Linux, and designed for Internet tablets such as Nokia's N810, Maemo 5 brings hardware-based graphics acceleration for OMAP3, cellular connectivity, and support for HD cameras. Other interesting new open source software components include Libcanberra, OpenMax, PulseAudio, and Tracker.
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Apple-Led OpenCL Brings More Freedom to Processors

December 17, 2008 In June 2008, Apple Inc. made news by unexpectedly announcing adoption of OpenCL for its next-generation OS. The entire picture of this strategy is now becoming clear. This is the direct response of a processor manufacturer to the impending risk that its current approach would lead to software developers leaving its platform. Multi-core computers are becoming more popular, GPUs are handling more than just graphics, and many processors with new architecture are emerging. OpenCL, which emerged in an era of processor chaos, is about to give software developers and equipment manufacturers the freedom to choose processors.
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