Khronos Invites Public Review of OpenKODE 1.0 Specification Draft.

OpenKODE 1.0 Public Release Expected in First Quarter of 2007; Futuremark Selected by Khronos to Create OpenKODE 1.0 Conformance Tests

CLEARLAKE, Calif. -- The Khronos[TM] Group today announced that a draft of the OpenKODE[TM] standard is available, on schedule, for public review by selected applicants. Khronos invites any interested party to execute a Khronos Reviewer's Agreement and provide feedback and guidance to the OpenKODE Working Group to ensure that this important standard meets the needs of the industry. Additionally, Khronos today announced that it has selected Futuremark[R] Corporation to create the OpenKODE Conformance Test Suite that will help ensure that OpenKODE provides a highly reliable set of cross-platform media APIs that mobile application developers can trust on any platform. OpenKODE 1.0 is expected to be publicly released in the first quarter of 2007. More details about OpenKODE and the Reviewer's Agreement are available at http://www.khronos.org/openkode/.

OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL[R] ES and OpenVG[TM] Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES[TM] and OpenMAX[TM] media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.

"The OpenKODE project is on schedule and is on target for completion just 12 months from initiation. The OpenKODE working group has enjoyed strong industry support and has completed a draft of the specification ready for the public review that is a vital part of the Khronos standardization process to ensure our standards are grounded in real-world requirements," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "Khronos is also delighted to be working with Futuremark to create the OpenKODE Conformance Test Suite, ensuring that this vital piece of the OpenKODE ecosystem will leverage their extensive testing expertise."

The OpenKODE conformance test suite being developed by Futuremark under contract to Khronos will enable mobile device chip makers, handset manufacturers and middleware vendors to confirm that their platforms conform to the OpenKODE 1.0 media stack specification and will include trans-API conformance tests to ensure that OpenKODE implementations support rich mixing of media types such as real-time video being processed in a 3D application. The suite of conformance testing tools will be made available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program and products that pass all the tests may use the OpenKODE trademark. Independently, Futuremark will complement the conformance test suites with a set of tools designed to provide performance metrics for state-of-the-art rich media OpenKODE applications.

"OpenKODE will be a significant advance for the handheld industry as it combines the Khronos industry-leading media APIs into a reliable set of functionality that can provide great native performance on mobile devices while reducing fragmentation from the software developers' point of view," said Tero Sarkkinen, Futuremark's executive vice president of sales and marketing. "Futuremark is delighted to play a key role in the industry roll-out of OpenKODE by applying our considerable expertise in performance measurement software development and functionality testing to create the OpenKODE conformance tests." For more information, please visit http://www.futuremark.com.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE[TM], OpenGL[R] ES, OpenMAX[TM], OpenVG[TM], OpenSL ES[TM], OpenML[TM] and COLLADA[TM] to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

For more information or to see all the Khronos APIs on Booths #106 & #206 at Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, March 7-9 2007, contact Elizabeth Riegel, Khronos Group Managing Director at [phone] or [e-mail]