LONDON – Rightware Oy, a 2009 startup that has developed a licensable 3-D graphical user interface called Kanzi, has announced the availability of Basemark CL, a benchmarking system for OpenCL-related software and hardware.
As well as launching Kanzi, Rightware (Espoo, Finland) acquired the mobile and embedded business unit of benchmarking organization Futuremark in January 2010.
Basemark CL provides performance measurement capabilities for computer and embedded equipment companies and semiconductor companies to test and optimize their OpenCL implementations. The current version is targeted at desktop computers with multi-core processors. Rightware said an embedded profile version of the benchmark will be published later but gave no indication of when.
OpenCL overseen and released by the Khronos Group is a royalty-free standard for parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and embedded devices.
The Basemark CL benchmark package features workloads that are designed to stress an OpenCL implementation in a realistic way and provide performance measurement data that is objective, relevant and comparable. OpenCL can be used to off-load certain appropriate applications and sub-routines from the main processor to the graphical processing unit and this is being done for some physics-based animations and other game-based elements.
"The ability to perform compute-intensive tasks in parallel, using virtually any processor present in the device opens the door for significant performance and functionality improvements. Basemark CL will provide an outstanding test platform for applications, games and user interfaces utilizing OpenCL as it will greatly improve the flow of getting things done, much faster and better," said Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Rightware, in a statement.
Rightware announced 3 million euro (about $4 million) of funding when the company was launched in December 2009. The company has developed performance analysis tools and benchmarks for OpenGL ES, OpenVG, Android, Linux, Symbian and Windows Mobile performance measurement. The company is headquartered in Espoo, Finland and has offices in Shanghai, Beijing, and Palo Alto.
