In 2000, Intel and a handful of industry rivals formed The Khronos Group to solve a growing problem—fragmented APIs and incompatible platforms. Neil Trevett persuaded fierce competitors like Nvidia and ATI to collaborate, share IP, and even fund a joint effort to unify the graphics ecosystem. Their breakthrough, OpenGL ES, ignited the mobile revolution by letting developers write apps once and run them anywhere. Over time, Khronos grew to 180 members and 23 standards, shaping everything from Vulkan to SYCL. Now, as AI standards loom, the consortium again faces a frontier of complexity and opportunity.
The Khronos Group was established in 2000 as a not-for-profit consortium aimed at developing open, royalty-free interoperability standards. The founding members included Intel, 3Dlabs, ATI, Nvidia, SGI, and Sun. Initially focusing on mobile and embedded graphics, Khronos launched OpenGL ES in 2006 and has since greatly expanded its membership, creating standards like Vulkan, OpenGL, WebGL, SYCL, glTF, OpenXR, SPIR-V, and Slang. This collaborative model has allowed competing companies to stabilize the fragmented API landscape, significantly contributing to the growth of the mobile and 3D graphics industries.
Khronos accomplished the impossible—getting competitors to share IP and proprietary technology, plus assigning top engineers and programmers, and pay dues! Led by Neil Trevett, a master negotiator and statesman, he convinced the dozen or so first members that unless they pulled together, the mobile market would fragment and never grow. The applications had to be platform, brand, and AI processor independent. OpenGL ES was born, and the developers flocked to it, and the market exploded. I think it’s fair to say that without Khronos and OpenGL ES, the mobile phone market would, at best, be half the size it is, if even that. The concept of write once, play everywhere, a much-touted dream, was realized, and hundreds of applications appeared that ran on any phone or tablet.
Seeing the success Khronos had with OpenGL and OpenGL ES, other API developers came to the organization and submitted their ideas and designs. By 2010, Khronos had over a half dozen significant APIs, and more were lined up. In 2009, the organization fielded its first parallel computing language, OpenCL, and in 2024, it introduced its highest-level C++ parallel programming language, SYCL.
In 2016, Khronos again tamed the API marriage and introduced the Vulkan GPU API.
Today, Khronos Group has over 180 paying and contributing members and 23 active standards. These royalty-free, open interoperability standards cover areas like 3D graphics, virtual and augmented reality, parallel computing, and machine learning, and include well-known specifications such as Vulkan, OpenXR, OpenGL, and glTF.
The organization has evolved over the years, with the segmentation of management and the oversight of the board. Trevett is still the president but shares responsibility—180 members and 20 active working groups are too big a span of control for anyone, and he has a full-time job as a VP at Nvidia.
Looking forward, the organization has to be judicious about the standards it takes on. Khronos played a key role in bootstrapping the Metaverse Standards Forum, but that body must now cohere as an independent organization, and it has its share of struggles right now trying to tame and organize the many standards involved in building an open metaverse, as well as providing a forum for coordination across standards developers. Waiting to join are a dozen AI-related standards, with specifications and goals that change weekly. With 140 companies making six different types of AI processors, the organization is going to have its work cut out for it. The AIP market, although in its relative infancy, is a lot more like the Wild West than the mobile market was back in 2005.
However, Khronos is a vital, vibrant organization and virtuous, feeding on its own success. I have no doubt we will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
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