In addition to the restructuring move which created Alphabet, Google has announced that it has chosen Vulkan 3D graphics API as the default API for upcoming versions of Android OS.

Currently, Android OS uses OpenGL ES, so it does not come as a surpise that Google picked Khronos, same company which is behind Vulkan API. The OpenGL ES has been quite popular in embedded platforms.

What makes the thing even more interesting is that Vulkan API is based on AMD's Mantle, a low-overhead API which AMD created iun order to show that low-overhead API is much better than what DirectX 11 had to offer. In case you missed it, AMD pretty much killed any further Mantle API development and chose to stick with DirectX 12.

According to Google, Vulkan is designed to enable better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work and should minimize CPU overhead in the driver and allow application to control the GPU operation more directly, which is pretty much what AMD Mantle did on the PC.

Google also announced it will work hard to help developers transition from OpenGL ES to Vulkan and, at the same time, will continue to contribute and support OpenGL ES as well.



Source: Android Developers Blog.