OpenCL 1.1 gets officially blessed

The Khronos Group has officially ratified the OpenCL 1.1 standard.
For those who came in late, OpenCL 1.1 is a programming standard for the parallel execution of tasks across multicore processors.
It includes a C-like programming language with APIs and enables parallel task execution across hardware including CPUs and graphics processing units (GPUs). Apple, IBM, Intel, Nvidia and AMD are among the companies promoting OpenCL.
The standard will be adopted as systems combine CPUs and GPUs to execute certain complex numerical and graphics processing tasks faster.
IBM and Dell have said that they want to stick GPUs in servers as a way to boost the performance of specific scientific and commercial applications.
This latest standard is an update from the best selling OpenCL 1.0 standard, which saw the light of day in December 2008. The OpenCL 1.1 standard adds additional functionality to provide better performance and programming flexibility.
OpenCL's main rival is the Directcompute API from Microsoft.
Graphics chip company Nvidia said it has already released an OpenCL 1.1 driver and that's available here.