Khronos plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API

Khronos plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan into a single API

| Source: PCPerspective Author: Mark Campbell

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.

You can join the discussion on Khronos' plans to merge OpenCL and Vulkan on the OC3D Forums.

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