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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Khronos Group has pushed out the Open CL 3.0 provisional specification, a major update to the cross-platform API used for accelerating software performance by using the concurrent programming capabilities of GPUs and CPUs.
[...] The ability to do general-purpose computing on GPUs, which are optimised for parallel processing, as well as easily taking advantage of multi-threading on a CPU, can make a massive difference in performance, not only at the high end in supercomputers, but also on PCs and mobiles. That said, even OpenCL 1.2, released in 2011, appears to be good enough for many developers.
"OpenCL 1.2 has proven itself as the baseline needed by all vendors and markets," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. Therefore, OpenCL 3.0 [PDF] "makes all functionality beyond version 1.2 optional". While this may seem like a backward step, the idea is that a broad range of devices can have OpenCL 3.0-compliant drivers, and that developers will query for additional features, such as those introduced in OpenCL 2.x, using them only if they are available. This also means it is easy for implementers to "upgrade" drivers, simply by adding any missing OpenCL 2.x queries.
The change is a reaction to issues with the "monolithic" OpenCL 2.x specifications, which were a deterrent to adoption since it was challenging to implement everything. Khronos even suggests in its presentation [PDF] that implementers "may choose to drop OpenCL 2.x features if not relevant to target markets, to reduce costs and increase quality."
The risk is that OpenCL 1.2 is now set in stone as a base API and developers may be reluctant to move beyond it.
[...] With OpenCL 3.0, less is more: the key feature is to make the specification modular so that future enhancements can be introduced gradually and implemented by a subset of drivers according to what is appropriate for the targeted devices. This means that adoption of OpenCL 3.0 should in theory be quick, because of the ease of migrating OpenCL 1.2 drivers, even if actual functionality is little changed.
Also at AnandTech.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday April 28 2020, @01:11AM
It's not simply "new technology". When C11 introduced stdatomic.h it was already highly controversial since it broke the C memory model, imposed specific hardware details and was implemented with invisible locks on hardware that doesn't support it which is why people still default on -std=c99 in their Makefile. So, when it was made a requirement for OpenCL 2.0, it effectively killed any interest in the standard.
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