Reverse-Engineered Rockchip NPU Driver Hitting Same Performance As Proprietary Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Reverse-Engineered Rockchip NPU Driver Hitting Same Performance As Proprietary Driver

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso recently began the effort of creating an open-source, reverse-engineered driver for the Rockchip NPU found in some of the latest Rockchip SoCs. After succeeding at open-source NPU driver support for the VeriSilicon NPU IP, Vizoso took up the challenge of working on Rockchip NPU support. With his open-source user-space driver he's already got his first model running. Not only is it running but it's doing so at similar performance to the proprietary driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rockchip-NPU-Early-Success

[schmidtbag]

Those are very promising results. However, not to be a cynic, but it also gets me to wonder how poorly optimized the blob is. That's not a shot at Tomeu - this is described as early access, so the fact he's already getting par results means there's only room for improvement.

[klokik]

That is very promising results. However, not to be a cynic, but it also gets me to wonder how poorly optimized the blob is. That's not a shot at Tomeu - this is described as early access, so the fact he's already getting par results means there's only room for improvement.

Assuming that blob is often the best (and only) thing you can get for the chip, any performance improvements on top of that increase the value of the platform. Thus financial support for the effort from the chip vendor would be beneficial to the both parties.

[antonyshen]

It's so cool, though I don't own any Rockchip SBC now. Thumbs up to the Dev!