The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 1.1, a backwards compatible update that boosts performance in the parallel programming standard. OpenCL 1.1 efficiently shares images and buffers by linking event objects and fence sync objects, features memory object destructor callbacks and now allows for OpenCL commands to be enqueued from additional hosts.

OpenCL is a free programming standard designed from the ground up to optimize coding in muliticore processors. The project was created by Apple and submitted to the Khronos Group in 2008. The project now features the participation of more than 30 software and hardware companies including, ARM, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Apple and Toshiba. In addition to OpenCL, the Khronos Group is responsible for WebGL and OpenGL graphics standards.

Documentation, references and the specification and header files can be found at khronos.org/opencl/. A full list of new features for Open CL are attached below. (Source: Khornos.org)

• Host-thread safety, enabling OpenCL commands to be enqueued e from multiple hosts
• Sub-buffer objects to distribute regions of a buffer across multiple OpenCL devices;
• User events to enable enqueued OpenCL commands to wait on external events;
• Event callbacks that can be used to enqueue new OpenCL commands based on event state changes in a non-blocking manner;
• 3-component vector data types;
• Global work-offset which enable kernels to operate on different portions of the NDRange;
• Memory object destructor callback;
• Read, write and copy a 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular region of a buffer object;
• Mirrored repeat addressing mode and additional image formats;
• New 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 event objects to OpenGL fence sync objects;
• Optional features in OpenCL 1.0 have been bought into core OpenCL 1.1 including: writes to a pointer of bytes or shorts from a kernel, and conversion of atomics to 32-bit integers in local or global memory.