Khronos Group Prioritizes China’s Participation in Creation of Key International Technology Standards

The Khronos™ Group, an international industry consortium creating open standards for the acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing, today commenced the opening events of its most recent tour to Beijing and Shanghai. The Khronos Board of Directors, including AMD, Apple, ARM, Epic, Ericsson, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, SONY and Texas Instruments, has made engaging the participation of Chinese industry a priority and has committed significant financial and staffing resources to Chinese activities. Khronos standards include OpenGL™ ES, the 3D graphics API used to power the user interface, games and applications on almost every smartphone in the world, OpenCL^® for heterogeneous parallel computation and WebGL™ for 3D graphics for HTML5.

Khronos provides a forum for open, international industry cooperation to create royalty-free standards that enable leading-edge operating systems and applications to access advanced computing and acceleration silicon. Khronos standards enable the silicon community to define future acceleration functionality to drive market growth and industry momentum. Khronos provides a state-of-the-art Intellectual property framework that protects both member IP and products shipping using conformant implementations of Khronos specifications.

Khronos launched a pan-Asian outreach tour in Beijing in December 2010 to encourage further Asian cooperation. One outcome is that the Korean Government has made a significant financial investment to build the 3D Fusion Technology Center to be managed by Kyungpook National University that will be at the center of Khronos activities in Korea. In February 2012, Taiwan selected one of their leading University professors to lead educational activities in Taipei and Khronos has been invited to return to meet with Taiwanese industry and academic members at Computex.

“We recognize China as a key player in the global mobile industry and therefore have prioritized the participation of the Chinese technology industry to contribute to the development of mobile acceleration standards,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “The royalty-free ecosystem of Khronos API standards continues to be shaped through international participation, and is ideal for expanding global market opportunities. Chinese companies will benefit significantly from Khronos participation and standards development will, in return, reflect Chinese industry requirements and priorities.”

Khronos has a series of free training and outreach events here in China this week, where any interested companies, universities or students are welcome to attend a day of lectures by Khronos technology experts. The sessions feature an industry analysis by Dr. Jon Peddie, President of JPR, a leading graphics consultancy, and a panel session conducted by Kathleen Maher, senior analyst at JPR. Details on the Beijing DevU on March 14^th are here: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/beijing-china-devu-2012. Details on the Shanghai event on March 17^th are here: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/shanghai-china-2012.

Khronos has created a Chinese language technical forum at cn.khronos.org, and is requesting volunteers who are fluent in Chinese and English and possess a firm understanding of the technical aspects of our APIs to apply to help moderate the forum. If you are interested in applying, please email info@khronos.org.

Continuing the Khronos commitment to engaging with the China technology industry, the Khronos Group will exhibit at the China Game Developer Conference on July 25-27, 2012, in Shanghai, where guests are invited see Khronos members demonstrate Khronos-based products in the “Khronos Pavilion” and learn about Khronos APIs at “Developer University.” More details at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/cgdc-2012#devu.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL^®, OpenGL^® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenVL™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL, WebCL and OpenVL are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.