News: 0001614798

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve

([Vulkan] 4 Hours Ago Vulkan 1.4.344)


Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.

The new extension introduced by Vulkan 1.4.344 is VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product . Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz and Georg Lehmann worked on the VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension. With VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product is the ability to use mixed precision dot product accumulate operations in shaders.

The VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension depends upon a new SPIR-V extension, SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product. SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product allows support for dot product operations on low-precision inputs with potentially higher precision accumulation. SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product initially lays out support for four different types:

- 2 component vector of 16bit float inputs with 32bit accumulation

- 2 component vector of 16bit float inputs with 16bit accumulation

- 2 component vector of bfloat16 inputs with 32bit or bfloat16 accumulation

- 4 component vector of 8bit float inputs with 32bit accumulation

That's the main highlight of today's Vulkan 1.4.344 update. All the changes in this spec revision can be found via [1]GitHub .



[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/commit/6aefabc0ad51073cf060e384ce43a59250d4d69c



Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
"happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus Torvalds, on releasing 1.3.27