A Provisional Specification To SPIR-V

Written by Michael Larabel in Standards on 3 March 2015 at 07:51 AM EST. 5 Comments
STANDARDS
In continuation to the article this morning on Khronos announcing OpenCL 2.1, the Vulkan graphics API, and SPIR-V, a provisional specification on SPIR-V is now available for interested developers.

Be sure to read my aforelinked article from embargo lift time for more details on SPIR-V. The short explanation is that it's now the IR consumed by new drivers for both compute (OpenCL) and graphics (Vulkan, though there's also work on GLSL support in-development). SPIR was originally based on LLVM IR but SPIR-V is a new clean design to overcome the limitations of LLVM IR, but The Khronos Group does hope to be able to put out a converter to translate SPIR-V back into LLVM IR.

Anyhow, it seems that Khronos did end up pushing out a provisional specification on this IR. Version 0.99 Revision 29 of SPIR-V was published with the lead authors being developers out of Intel and LunarG.


Those wanting to learn the ins and outs of this intermediate representation that will become extremely import and interesting in the years to come, hit up the PDF specifications. The SPIR-V 1.0 specification isn't expected for some months.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week