Khronos Standards

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium that creates and promotes open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. ARM is a Promoter Member of Khronos and has been heavily involved in the foundation since its inception and currently has representatives chairing the OpenGL ES and OpenWF working groups, while actively participating in many others.

OpenGL ES 2.0

With the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard from Khronos, developers can write complex shader effect for 3D graphics acceleration using the Mali™-200 and Mali-400 graphics processing units (GPUs). The OpenGL ES 2.0 support will soon be seen in a wide variety of devices including such areas as gaming, set top boxes, user interfaces and automotive dashboards.

View examples of graphics acceleration at the Mali Developer Center.

OpenGL ES 1.1

All of the Mali™ GPUs from ARM, beginning with the Mali-55 GPU, support the OpenGL ES 1.1 standard from Khronos which enables impressive hardware graphics acceleration using a fixed function pipeline. Some of the devices implementing 3D graphics acceleration using OpenGL ES 1.1 include, mobile phone user interfaces, personal navigation devices and web browsers.

OpenVG

With the OpenVG support found in Mali GPUs, developers can render 2D images with crisp, clear and responsive effects. Whether it is used for font rendering, graphics smoothing or sophisticated illustration, graphics quality using OpenVG implementation can provide impressive results.

OpenMAX

OpenMAX is a royalty-free, cross-platform API developed by the Khronos Group that provides a comprehensive media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms.

The OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) API contain a comprehensive set of audio, video, signal processing function primitives which can be implemented and optimized on various CPUs and hardware engines and then used for accelerated codec functionality. API functions target key algorithms in such codecs as H.264, MPEG-4, AAC, MP3, and JPEG. The function primitives are meant to cover the hotspots which typically take up 80% of codec processing. Codec porting to new hardware platforms can be as simple as swapping in the new DL library and recompiling.

ARM has created a reference implementation of the OpenMAX DL API, as well as hand-optimised ports for the NEON general-purpose SIMD engine found in ARM Cortex™-A series processors and the SIMD extensions found in the ARM-11 processor family.

Available for download from ARM are: