News: 0001631841

  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)

OpenCL 3.1 Released To Bolster AI & HPC Workloads

([Standards] 6 Hours Ago OpenCL 3.1)


Six years after [1]the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group.

Coming as a pleasant surprise this morning is the release of OpenCL 3.1. OpenCL 3.1 brings proven capabilities into the core OpenCL specification that were previously handled as extensions or optional capabilities. Among the mandates with OpenCL 3.1 are SPIR-V ingestion support for being able to handle SPIR-V kernels, the IR in common with Vulkan and can be generated from the lieks of LLVM/Clang as well.

Other features pulled into core for OpenCL 3.1 are designed to help provide effective AI and HPC support ato OpenCL. Mandates there include subgoups, integer dot products, a new query for suggested local work group size, and a standard device UUID query to match Vulkan behavior.

The OpenCL 3.1 release also adds new language features without relying on extensions, improved OpenCL C printf() support, relaxing the inclusive scopes in the OpenCL memory model, and other improvements.

There are multiple vendors already working on OpenCL 3.1 support, including the Mesa driver and Rusticl, PoCL, and CLVK are noted as open-source implementations of OpenCL 3.1 that will be forthcoming.

Today's OpenCL 3.1 release announcement also notes new extensions are on the way for command buffers for low-overhead replayable workloads, unified share memory improvements, cooperative matrix operations, and new AI data types for low-precision formats.

It's wonderful seeing OpenCL 3.1 released and that it continues to evolve for meeting today's AI and HPC needs. More details on the OpenCL 3.1 changes can be found via the announcement on [2]Khronos.org . The OpenCL 3.1 documentation can be found via [3]GitHub .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/opencl-30-spec

[2] https://www.khronos.org/blog/opencl-3.1-is-here

[3] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/OpenCL-Docs/releases/tag/v3.1.0



8GB Ought To Be Enough For Anybody

REDMOND, WA -- In a shocking move, Microsoft has revealed that the new
Xbox console will only contain an 8 gigabyte hard drive. This implies that
the machines will use a version of the Windows operating system that fits
within only 8GB. Squeezing Windows into such a small footprint must
certainly be one of the greatest technological achievements ever crafted
by Microsoft's Research & Assimilation Department.

"I can't believe it," said one industry observer who always happens to
show up when this Humorix reporter needs to quote somebody. "To think that
they were able to strip away the easter egg flight simulators, the
multi-gigabyte yet content-free Help files, and all of the other crap that
comes bundled with Windows is simply remarkable. I don't even want to
think about all of the manpower, blood, sweat, and tears required to
distill Windows into only 8 gigabytes of bare essentials. Wow!"

Hard drive manufacturers are deeply disturbed over the news. Explained one
PR flack at Eastern Analog, "We depend on Microsoft to continually produce
bloated software that becomes larger and larger with each passing day. We
can't sell huge 100GB drives if Microsoft Windows only occupies a measly 8
gigs! They will never buy a new drive if Microsoft doesn't force them!"