With a brief blog post, Red Hat has announced that they are now members of the Khronos Group. Red Hat, one of the largest vendors of Linux software and services, would like to influence the direction of OpenGL and the upcoming Vulkan API. Also, apart from Valve, they are one of the only Linux vendors that contributes to the Khronos Group as an organization. I hope that their input counter-balances Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who are each members, in areas that are beneficial to the open-source operating system.
As for now, Red Hat intends to use their membership to propose OpenGL extensions as well as influence Vulkan as previously mentioned. It also seems reasonable that they would push for extensions to Vulkan, which the Khronos Group mentioned would support extensions at GDC, especially if something that they need fails to reach “core” status. While this feels late, I am glad that they at least joined now.
*Tips fedora*
*Tips fedora*
One would expect Red Hat, and
One would expect Red Hat, and other Enterprise Linux makers to support Vulkan, after all OpenCL has always used SPIR/SPIR-V for OpenCL(GPGPU) acceleration on GPUs, and general purpose compute. OpenGL as well will be compiled into SPIR-V to run on the GPU, as well as other languages, and scripting languages, even a subset of C++ will be compiled into SPIR-V and run/be accelerated through the Vulkan API/LLVM on the GPU. Certainly Red Hat is probably developing for that AMD Zen Based Server SKU with the Greenland GPU accelerator, and HBM.
If the HSA foundations proposed HSAIL intermediate language specification looks strangely similar to What the SPIP-V intermediate language offers in portable HSA aware code, its probably no surprise that the Khronos group’s membership is probably represented on both group’s/Foundation’s committees by the same companies/orginizations. There will be HSA aware systems from all the CPU/SOC/GPU makers that will probably include both Vulkan(SPIR-V), and HSAIL based LLVM cross platform APIs.
AMD’s forthcoming Zen server APUs, as well as some K12 custom ARMv8a ISA custom microarchitecture Server APUs based on AMD’s SMT capable(K12) ARMv8a, and SMT capable x86(Zen) custom GPU accelerated server APU systems, will bring HSA to the server room. So I’d expect more than just Red Hat to become a member of Khronos, and probably the HSA foundation also. GPU acceleration will be in the server room as standard equipment on all servers in the not to distant future. So expect all the Linux based enterprise software providers to be on board with both Khronos’, as well as the HSA foundations’ HSA aware APIs, and Vulkan is a very HSA aware API by the definition of the functionality it provides for both graphics, and GPGPU via its use of the SPIR-V IL/LLVM.
I would imagine that AMD has some generalized system simulation software running that Red Hat, and others can use to begin to develop for the Zen/K12 custom architectures that will have to have the working software available when they go to market. Probably at some time closer to Zen’s and K12’s release to the market, some software companies like Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, etc. will probably have development Mules with engineering/development samples of the actual Zen and K12 silicon, or maybe some done up in FPGA hardware/software verification systems. The software development lead times are always necessary long before the actual hardware is released for general sales. Khronos’s APIs are used extensively in mobile, and expect this to also be the case for the Linux based server/software ecosystem suppliers once the server new server APUs from AMD are ready for market.
Technically, SPIR/SPIR-V is
Technically, SPIR/SPIR-V is available by an extension in OpenCL 1.2+. The default kernel language for OpenCL 2.0 and earlier was OpenCL C. OpenCL 2.1 has SPIR-V as a core technology. It can still compile OpenCL C natively though.
Scott, its more likely the
Scott, its more likely the OpenCL part of the VULKAN SPIR-V driven API/LLVM that will be of more interest to Red Hat, and the other enterprise Linux distro makers, that and the use of SPIR-V as the main cross hardware platform software stack for a standard intermediate language for both general purpose GPU acceleration, and graphics. There will even be the possibility of compiling/interpreting scripting languages into SPIR-V and accelerating the workloads on the GPU, as well as other high level languages. Certainly Vulkan’s ability for graphics will also be helpful, but the server APUs will be arriving, with their HBM, and GPU cores with loads of single 32 bit, and double 64 bit floating point units for server/HPC workloads.