Khronos Group

Khronos Group

Motto	Open standards for graphics, media and parallel computation
Formation	2000
Type	Consortium
Purpose	Creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, rich media and parallel computation on a wide variety of platforms and devices
Headquarters	Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Coordinates	45°30′30″N 122°50′03″W / 45.508407°N 122.834305°W
President	Neil Trevett
Website	www.khronos.org

The Khronos Group is an American non-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos members may contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and accelerate delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

On 31 July 2006, it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group.^[1][2]

History

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by companies including ATI Technologies, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Sun Microsystems. It now has roughly 120 member companies, over 30 adopters, and 24 conforming members.^[3] Its president is Neil Trevett.

Working Groups

• COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assets.
• EGL, an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system^[4]
• OpenCL, a cross-platform computation API.^[5]
• OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics API
• OpenGL ES, a derivative of OpenGL for use on mobile and embedded systems, such as cell phones, portable gaming devices, and more
• OpenGL SC, a safety critical profile of OpenGL ES designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical market
• OpenKCam, Advanced Camera Control API
• OpenKODE, an API for providing abstracted, portable access to operating system resources such as file systems, networks and math libraries
• OpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionality
• OpenML, an API for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media
• OpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback
• OpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphics.
• OpenVX, Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and libraries
• OpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display control
• SPIR, a intermediate compiler target for OpenCL and Vulkan
• StreamInput, an API for consistently handling input devices.
• Vulkan, a low-overhead computer graphics API
• WebCL, a JavaScript binding to OpenCL within a browser.
• WebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards

Members

Khronos group divides its members followingly:^[6]

• Academic Contributors – have full API working group participation but no voting rights.
• Contributors – have full API working group participation and voting rights, and marketing benefits.
• Promoters – act as the "Board of Directors" to set the direction of the Group, with final specification ratification voting rights.

Current members (as of 29 January 2016) are (highlights):

Promoters

AMD/ATI Apple Inc. ARM Holdings Epic Games Google

Huawei Imagination Technologies Intel Corporation Nokia Nvidia

Qualcomm Samsung Electronics Sony Computer Entertainment Vivante Corporation

Contributors

Adobe Amazon.com Blizzard Entertainment Inc. Codeplay Ericsson Google Huawei Technologies IBM LG Electronics

Lucasfilm Ltd. Matrox Graphics Microsoft Corporation Mozilla Nintendo[7] Oculus VR Panasonic Pixar Red Hat

Renesas Electronics Synopsys Texas Instruments Unity Technologies Valve corporation VIA Alliance Semiconductor VMware

Academic Contributors

China Academy of Telecommunication Research of MIIT Columbia University ETRI Imperial College London

Institute for Information Industry MIT Lincoln Laboratory Oregon State University

Seoul National University Universita di Bologna University of Bristol

Past members

• Creative Technology
• id Software
• Motorola
• Oracle/Sun Microsystems

Khronos Group maintains current lists of its promoters,^[8] contributors,^[9] and academic members.^[10]

References

1. "OpenGL ARB to pass control of OpenGL specification to Khronos Group". Khronos press release.
2. "OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group". AccessMyLibrary Archive.
3. "Khronos Group Conformant members".
4. "EGL Overview". Khronos website. 15 October 2009.
5. "Khronos launches heterogeneous computing initiative". Khronos press release. 16 June 2008.
6. "Khronos Promoter Members". khronos.org.
7. Alex Wawro (22 September 2015). "Nintendo joins graphics standards body Khronos Group". Gamasutra.
8. "Promoter Members". khronos.org.
9. "Contributor Members". khronos.org.
10. "Academic Members". khronos.org.

External links

• Official website
• Pulli, Kari. "New APIs for Mobile Graphics"