Khronos plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API

bssunilreddy

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Khronos plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API



Khronos has now revealed plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API, merging graphics and compute into a single open standard.



This was announced yesterday when the specifications for OpenCL 2.2 and SPIR-V 1.2 were finalised, stating that the future of OpenCL and Vulkan will be interlinked, likely bringing OpenCL into the Vulkan Ecosystem to create a lot of interesting software development possibilities.







The OpenCL working group has taken the decision to converge its roadmap with Vulkan, and use Vulkan as the basis for the next generation of explicit compute APIs – this also provides the opportunity for the OpenCL roadmap to merge graphics and compute.



This change makes sense for a lot of reasons, bringing developers with a lot of different needs and disciplines under a single banner to create an ecosystem that offers a lot more possibilities than competing APIs.

By design, Vulkan already occupies a similar place in the market to OpenCL, though there are clearly places where each API has benefits and downsides. Merging the benefits of both APIs under a single banner will create a "best of both worlds" scenario where Vulkan could target additional hardware features and OpenCL could benefit from the broader marketing appeal of Vulkan.

The Kronos Group has not stated any timeframe for when Vulkan and OpenCL will be merged, just stating that it is part of their future roadmap, which means that this merger will not be happening anytime soon.

Source:Khronos plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API | Software | OC3D News




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Desmond

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Makes sense and a lot more convenient. Will probably also push developers to use Vulkan more than OpenGL.
 
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bssunilreddy

bssunilreddy

Chosen of the Omnissiah
I can imagine Vega is going to spank Pascal in vulkan titles so this merger could push Nvidia into releasing Volta sooner as its supposedly going to have massive asynchronous compute performance increases over Pascal.



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