China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) Promotes Adoption of Khronos Open Standards by Chinese Industry

November 14, 2017 - Beaverton, OR — The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, has reached a cooperative agreement with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), part of the Chinese National Research and Development Program. Under this agreement, CAICT and Khronos will work together to encourage and enable local Chinese companies to adopt Khronos international standards and benefit from becoming officially conformant.

Also demonstrating increasing interest in China, Khronos welcomes Tencent, one of the worlds largest internet, gaming, and mobile hardware and software companies to its membership. Tencent joins other Chinese Khronos members such as long-standing member company Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider and pioneer in driving industry standards globally. Both companies aim to play a significant role in the development and adoption of Khronos open standards, and to make a substantial local impact through growing the use of those standards by the Chinese industry.

"The vibrant Chinese market is an incredibly important area for advancement for Khronos. We are fortunate to have some of the biggest global technology players from the region offering their expertise to our mission, and supporting Khronos as we widen the use of international standards for the benefit of all," said Neil Trevett, Khronos president.

"Tencent joined Khronos with the aim to work with other global members, actively participate in the definition of open standards and contribute to API specification development. We also hope to provide more industry support on the latest technologies and improve the development of supporting ecosystems," said Li Shen, General Manager of NEXT R&D Center, Tencent.

"Huawei Technologies is a strong supporter of open standards and an active contributor to several communities from cloud management, to telecom protocols and compute APIs. Khronos, as a leading standards body supporting heterogeneous processing, is especially important to Huawei providing its customers and partners industry standard interfaces for Huawei system solutions and mobile devices for the Telecom, Enterprise and Cloud Computing industries. Huawei is an adopter of Khronos OpenGL® ES for its mobile devices and a participant in several of its working groups including OpenCL™. With this partnership between CAICT and Khronos, Huawei looks forward to seeing increased adoption of Khronos standards in China," said Craig Davies, Principal Hardware Architect and Huawei Khronos Board Member.

Any company that formally adopts a Khronos API executes the Khronos Adopters Agreement and follows the Khronos-defined conformance process. Once conformance is achieved, Adopters gain access to a number of benefits, including the ability to use the API trademark and logo on packaging and in promotion, and become listed on the Khronos Conformant Product website. Additionally, conformant implementations are protected by the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework.CAICT has created a program that will help local Chinese companies overcome language, cost, and other barriers to realize the advantages of Khronos Adoption and conformance testing.

"CAICT and Khronos have reached agreement for in-depth cooperation on Khronos standards, conformance tests and Adopters programs. Our aim is to promote the application of Khronos standards in China, and support the development of parallel computing and hardware acceleration technology in the Chinese industry," Wang Zhi Qin, Vice President of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

"Through our shared goal with CAICT, we will be able to enable Chinese companies of all sizes to test their implementations of Khronos specifications, and become conformant to Khronos international standards. Member momentum in this region, as well as our agreement with the CAICT national think tank, speaks to the commitment that we have for the promotion of our open standards across the globe," adds Trevett.

For more information about The Khronos Group visit Khronos.org.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision and neural nets on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, COLLADA™, OpenXR™ and glTF™. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
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