• New data types including 3-component vectors and additional image formats;
• Handling commands from multiple hosts and processing buffers across multiple devices;
• Operations on regions of a buffer including read, write and copy of 1D, 2D or 3D rectangular regions;
• Enhanced use of events to drive and control command execution;
• Additional OpenCL C built-in functions such as integer clamp, shuffle and asynchronous strided copies;
• Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL and OpenGL events.

Full Press Release is available here.

If you are an NVIDIA registered developer you can download their OpenCL 1.1 Conformance Candidate and AMD will have OpenCL 1.1 support included with their next Steam SDK release.

NVIDIA has released version 3.0 of their CUDA Toolkit. As well as some significant new features this release also  provides tools to prepare for the upcoming Fermi-based GPUs. Highlights of this release include:

• Support for the Fermi architecture, with:
  • Native 64-bit GPU support
  • Multiple Copy Engine support
  • ECC reporting
  • Concurrent Kernel Execution
  • Fermi HW debugging support in cuda-gdb
  • Fermi HW profiling support for CUDA C and OpenCL in Visual Profiler
• C++ Class Inheritance and Template Inheritance support for increased programmer productivity
• A new unified interoperability API for Direct3D and OpenGL, with support for:
  • OpenGL texture interop
  • Direct3D 11 interop support
  • CUDA Driver / Runtime Buffer Interoperability, which allows applications using the CUDA Driver API to also use libraries implemented using the CUDA C Runtime such as CUFFT and CUBLAS.

• CUBLAS now supports all BLAS1, 2, and 3 routines including those for single and double precision complex numbers
• Up to 100x performance improvement while debugging applications with cuda-gdb
• cuda-gdb hardware debugging support for applications that use the CUDA Driver API
• cuda-gdb support for JIT-compiled kernels
• New CUDA Memory Checker reports misalignment and out of bounds errors, available as a stand-alone utility and debugging mode within cuda-gdb
• CUDA Toolkit libraries are now versioned, enabling applications to require a specific version, support multiple versions explicitly, etc.
• CUDA C/C++ kernels are now compiled to standard ELF format
• Support for device emulation mode has been packaged in a separate version of the CUDA C Runtime (CUDART), and is deprecated in this release. Now that more sophisticated hardware debugging tools are available and more are on the way, NVIDIA will be focusing on supporting these tools instead of the legacy device emulation functionality.
  • On Windows, use the new Parallel Nsight development environment for Visual Studio, with integrated GPU debugging and profiling tools (was code-named “Nexus”). Please see www.nvidia.com/nsight for details.
  • On Linux, use cuda-gdb and cuda-memcheck, and check out the solutions from Allinea and TotalView that will be available soon.

• Support for all the OpenCL features in the latest R195 production driver package:
  • Double Precision
  • Graphics Interoperability with OpenCL, Direc3D9, Direct3D10, and Direct3D11 for high performance visualization
  • Query for Compute Capability, so you can target optimizations for GPU architectures (cl_nv_device_attribute_query)
  • Ability to control compiler optimization settings via support for pragma unroll in OpenCL kernels and an extension that allows programmers to set compiler flags. (cl_nv_compiler_options)
  • OpenCL Images support, for better/faster image filtering
  • 32-bit global and local atomics for fast, convenient data manipulation
  • Byte Addressable Stores, for faster video/image processing and compression algorithms
  • Support for the latest OpenCL spec revision 1.0.48 and latest official Khronos OpenCL headers as of 2010-02-17

The toolkit, drivers, tools and documentation are available from http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda_3_0_downloads.html.

• Update release for ATI Stream SDK v2.0.
• Support for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3.
• Support for Ubuntu® 9.10.
• Support for debugging OpenCL™ with GDB on x86 CPUs under Linux® (see application note for more details).
• Preview: Support for OpenCL™ / Microsoft® DirectX® 9 interoperability. Please see this knowledge base article for more information about this preview feature.
• Additional OpenCL™ samples:
  • BoxFilter
  • FFT
  • GaussianNoise (under cpp_cl)
  • URNG
• Stream KernelAnalyzer with OpenCL™ support (available for download separately from Stream KernelAnalyzer Product Page).
• Various OpenCL™ compiler and runtime fixes and enhancements (see developer release notes for more details).
• Support for ATI Radeon™ HD 5670 GPU and ATI Radeon™ HD 5570 GPU.

• support for the an Installable Client Driver (ICD), which allows for multiple OpenCL implementations to co-exist on the same system
• a stream performance profiler integrated into Visual Studio 2008
• a preview implementation of support for Double Precision in OpenCL C kernels
• a raft of OpenGL, DirectX 10 and CAL interoperability support previews

Find the full details here.

AMD have also posted the first in a series of Tutorials on using OpenCL, written by Ben Gaster who is the OpenCL Architect at AMD (and incidentally an ex-colleague of mine ).

Update: Also available in poster format.

In the case of questions about the the specification, or queries about forthcoming revisions of the standard (or even suggestions), one should definitely go to the Khronos Group’s own OpenCL forum. Here you will find forum members who are actually involved with the OpenCL standard body as well as developers and users of vendor implementations. It’s a fair bet that you will get most specification related questions answered here.

In the case that you believe you are observing something that does not meet the specification as stated, in a vendor implementation, then your first port of call should be the vendor’s own support forum. If it’s an obvious bug or known performance issue the odds are good that it will have already been documented, either in an answer to a prior forum posting or in a FAQ or Release Note.  It should go without saying that you should take care to follow their procedure for submitting queries or bugs before posting to a forum (i.e. do a forum search and read release notes – we don’t compile them just for fun).

Here’s a list of OpenCL related forum resources I have to hand:

• Khronos Group OpenCL forum
• NVIDIA OpenCL forum
• AMD Stream forum (AMD don’t have a public OpenCL forum at time of writing)

• Beyond3D GPGPU Technology & Programming forum
• GPGPU General GPGPU Discussion forum

I’m sure there are more out there, if you find them please send them to me and I’ll start keeping an OpenCL Resource page.

Update: Incidentally there is quite a bit of information on the PGI web site and a solid series of articles by Michael Wolfe published on HPCWire.