In the wonderful world of the realtime 3D apis, you may already know OpenGL and DirectX. While Apple released Metal to limit overhead, the Khronos group just released Vulkan.
This new API main goal is to lower the overhead on the CPU and use multiple CPU cores
What does it mean for us? How will this affect our work and what we can do? I would simply say that it is another great news. This means that we are able to make even more complex calculation on the CPU(s) to achieve realtime feedback in our applications. Suppose that we are using realtime heat related calculations in our applications. If, via the 3D interactivity we created in the scene, we modify the scene, the computations results will be done even faster.
The Khronos group also announced that the shader compilation process will now use an intermediate binary language to avoid shader recompilation.
Even if this API will be supported by 3D middlewares, 3D applications developers got to have a look at how things work under the hood. This will give us a clear idea of what we can do in this great no-CPU-bottleneck-multiple-CPU-core world ahead of us. The Vulkan SDK is available on the Khronos group website and you can already update your graphic device drivers from the manufacturers' websites.