The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, has announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V 1.0 specifications for heterogeneous parallel computation.

Consumption of the new SPIR-V cross-API intermediate language is guaranteed in the core OpenCL 2.1 specification. Khronos has released open source utilities and extensions to enable use of SPIR-V in OpenCL 1.2 and 2.0, as well as the upcoming Vulkan graphics API, ensuring widespread availability of its powerful runtime capabilities for developers of parallel computation languages and frameworks.

The OpenCL C++ kernel language released in the OpenCL 2.1 provisional specification is being finalized and will be released imminently, also using SPIR-V for run-time execution. The OpenCL 2.1 specification is available for immediate download at www.khronos.org/opencl/ and SPIR-V 1.0 is available at http://www.khronos.org/spir/.