The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, publicly released the OpenCL 3.0 Provisional Specifications.
OpenCL 3.0 realigns the OpenCL roadmap to enable developer-requested functionality to be broadly deployed by hardware vendors, and it significantly increases deployment flexibility by empowering conformant OpenCL implementations to focus on functionality relevant to their target markets. OpenCL 3.0 also integrates subgroup functionality into the core specification, ships with a new OpenCL C 3.0 language specification, uses a new unified specification format, and introduces extensions for asynchronous data copies to enable a new class of embedded processors. The provisional OpenCL 3.0 specificationsenable the developer community to provide feedback on GitHub before the specifications and conformance tests are finalized.
To cater to a widening diversity of OpenCL devices, OpenCL 3.0 makes all functionality beyond version 1.2 optional. All OpenCL 1.2 applications will continue to run unchanged on any OpenCL 3.0 device. All OpenCL 2.X features are coherently defined in the new unified specification, and current OpenCL 2.X implementations that upgrade to OpenCL 3.0 can continue to ship with their existing functionality with full backwards compatibility. All OpenCL 2.X API features can be queried, and OpenCL C 3.0 adds macros for querying optional language features.
“OpenCL is the most pervasive, cross-vendor, open standard for low-level heterogeneous parallel programming—widely used by applications, libraries, engines, and compilers that need to reach the widest range of diverse processors,” said Neil Trevett, vice president at NVIDIA, president of the Khronos Group and OpenCL Working Group Chair.