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



Brief History Of Linux (#29)

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is credited by many (especially ESR
himself) as the reason Netscape announced January 22, 1998 the release of
the Mozilla source code. In addition, Rob Malda of Slashdot has also
received praise because he had recently published an editorial ("Give us
the damn source code so we can fix Netscape's problems ourselves!")

Of course, historians now know the true reason behind the landmark
decision: Netscape engineers were scared to death that a large
multi-national corporation would acquire them and crush Mozilla. Which
indeed did happen much later, although everybody thought the conqueror
would be Microsoft, not AOL (America's Online Lusers).

The Netscape announcement prompted a strategy session among Linux bigwigs
on February 3rd. They decided a new term to replace 'free software' was
needed; some rejected suggestions included "Free Source", "Ajar Source",
"World Domination Source", "bong-ware" (Bong's Obviously Not GNU), and
"Nude Source". We can thank Chris Peterson for coining "Open Source",
which became the adopted term and later sparked the ugly "Free Software
vs. Open Source", "Raymond vs. Stallman" flame-a-thons.