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Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip (BOSC) was founded in December 2021. It is a research and academic institution dedicated to developing cutting-edge and fundamental technologies in the RISC-V field, as well as providing college training courses in the related fields. BOSC is committed to driving innovation, fostering global collaboration, and contributing to the advancement and prosperity of the RISC-V ecosystem.

BOSC continuously engages in long-term research and development of open-source projects including open-source high-performance RISC-V processor “XiangShan” , large-scale Network on Chip IP “RISC-V OpenNoc”, non-profit educational initiative “One Student One Chip” and open-source RISC-V verification platform “UnityChip”.

XiangShan is an open-source high-performance RISC-V processor. The XiangShan project aims to become an international open-source platform for architectural innovation, catering the R&D demand of industry, academia, and individual enthusiasts. As one of the most popular open-source hardware projects in the world, XiangShan has garnered over 5,000 stars and more than 670 forks on GitHub. XiangShan has been adopted as a research platform by universities all over the world, including Duke University, The Ohio State University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Peking University, etc. The source code, documentation and development tools of XiangShan are all open-sourced on GitHub.

Tom Olson and Ralph Potter are the outgoing and incoming Chairs of the Vulkan Working Group. They join the Software Engineering Daily podcast with Joe Nash to talk about earlier graphics APIs, what motivated the creation of Vulkan, modern GPUs, and more.

This video from Android Developers, explores the OpenXR API, their partnership with Unity, and the experimental release of Unity for Android XR, including features and roadmap.

Khronos just returned from a dynamic and productive week at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, which took place from December 3–6 in the bustling city of Tokyo, Japan. With key announcements, a series of well-attended Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, and a vibrant networking event, Khronos reaffirmed its position at the forefront of standardization for the 3D industry.

Here are some highlights of Khronos’s activities at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, from unveiling new initiatives to fostering collaboration across the graphics, web, and XR ecosystems.

The latest update to Ultra Engine introduces a new material painting system, combined with a robust integration of GLSL hardware tessellation. This feature enables artists to add unique detail throughout their game levels, transforming plain tiling textures into life-like detailed environments. Ultra Engine continues to leverage Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.

The Engineering Mathematics and Computing Lab (EMCL), headed by Prof. Dr. Vincent Heuveline, is a research group at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR), dedicated to providing a stimulating and supportive environment for innovative research at the interface between applied mathematics and computer science. The EMCL is located at Heidelberg University, Germany. The EMCL is characterized by its openness to multidisciplinary research in the field of engineering and scientific computing.

The Khronos Group is delighted to welcome Google’s adoption of the OpenXR open standard. This significant milestone marks a win-win, empowering AndroidXR to harness a robust content ecosystem while offering OpenXR developers access to a significantly broader audience.

R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (RRD) is a global provider of marketing, packaging, print and supply chain solutions. The company delivers end-to-end solutions, effectively targeting and transforming customer touchpoints into moments of impact. With over 30,000 employees across 26 countries, RRD offers a global network of resources, creative execution, proprietary technologies, and measurable media that influences engagement across the entire customer journey.

Specifically, the GO CreativeSM team of RRD brings over three decades of experience in design, production, marketing, business communications and digital productivity solutions. Leveraging the best-in-class technologies like 3D, AI, AR, VR and Web 3.0 we digitize every aspect of the Customer Journey, creating customized immersive and interactive experiences at scale. Our 3D and XR domain experts support clients 24x7 with the capacity and expertise needed to deliver high-quality 3D assets and Immersive and Interactive solutions within any turnaround time, for any industry. We adopt a consultative approach for our clients, and use proprietary technologies and measurable media, to enhance and influence customer engagement, and build brand loyalty.

NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, is a day-zero conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementation. Vulkan 1.4 support in NVK has been merged into Mesa and will be part of the Mesa 25.0 release in early 2025.

The Khronos Group has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:

• Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance.
• Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.
• Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.
• 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

Khronos Group announces the release of the glTF Sample Viewer version 1.1 featuring the restructuring of the repository, adding WebP support, enhanced mobile support, adding KHR_animation_pointer support, integrating glTF validator, and more! In this blog, members from UX3D explore the new features and share insights on how it is easier to integrate Sample Viewer into web applications.

OpenXR Working Group member, Fred Emmott shares his best practices for OpenXR API Layers on Windows. His latest blog shares 12 tips that will help you avoid common problems, maximize your software’s compatibility, find issues before your users, and simplifying & accelerating debugging.

Pico has announced that their runtime is now officially OpenXR 1.1 compliant, highlighting their commitment to advancing industry standards and delivering seamless interoperability for developers and users. PICO’s OpenXR SDK can be downloaded on their PICO Developer website.

The popular Compiler Explorer (a.k.a. Godbolt) tool now supports SPIR-V as an input. For those who work with SPIR-V disassembly you can now use this tool to quickly play with, validate, and share examples with others. Check out the SPIR-V Optimizer & SPIR-V Validator examples online. More tools such as SPIRV-Cross and SPIRV-Reflect are also in the works .

The Khronos Group has announced the launch of the new Slang™ Initiative. This initiative will oversee and advance the open-source Slang shading language and compiler, building on 15 years of research, development, and deployment experience. Supported by NVIDIA since 2017, Slang has been widely adopted in production projects across the industry.

Slang empowers real-time graphics developers with innovative features that complement existing shading languages, including modular code development, portable deployment to multiple target APIs, and neural computation in graphics shaders. Hosting under multi-company governance at Khronos will enable and foster industry-wide collaboration to drive Slang’s continued evolution.