Eighteen months after releasing a first version of the standard for programming heterogeneous parallel computers, the industry consortium has presented an updated version of OpenCL

The Khronos Group announced the finalized specs for OpenGL 4.1 and unsurprisingly, the focus was primarily on improving graphical performance on mobile devices. OpenGL 4.1 is completely cross compatible with OpenCL, the mobile 3D graphics API and features new tools that allow for the easy porting of code from one platform to another.

AMD and SiSoftware have teamed up to develop a benchmark testing suites for OpenCL. Released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware's Sandra 2010. OpenCL is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. SiSoftware's Sandra 2010 software provides remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks.

Chipmaker AMD has integrated the open standard OpenCL specification for parallel programming into its ATI Stream development environment.

It's been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though -- on the same day as NVIDIA's OpenCL driver launch for Windows -- they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

Nine months ago the Khronos Group released the specification to OpenGL 3.0. OpenGL 3.0 brought version 1.30 of the GL Shading Language, the introduction of Vertex Array Objects, texture arrays, more flexible frame-buffer objects, and a number of other graphical features.

The Khronos group announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification described as the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices.

The PySide LPGL Python binding for Qt is new and the Python::OpenCL wrapper now runs with AMD's ATI Stream SDK.

OpenCL is present in NVIDIA's Linux driver as well as the just-released Mac OS X 10.6, but there is support for the Open Computing Language coming forward in the open-source world through the Gallium3D driver infrastructure.