VC4CL: Bringing OpenCL To The Raspberry Pi

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VC4CL: Bringing OpenCL To The Raspberry Pi

VC4CL is a newer effort bringing OpenCL to the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPUs as found in the Raspberry Pi boards...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=VC4CL-OpenCL-Raspberry-Pi

[fakenmc]

Great news, must try it.

[schmidtbag]

I'd be interested in some benchmarks, particularly where you can also compare CPU performance (like Luxmark).

[sykobee]

It's be interesting to see what the RPi GPU can achieve versus on the RPi CPU, and other CPUs.
Given the RPi is about 30 GFLOPS theoretical I don't think it's worth comparing with other discrete GPUs :-)

[andrei_me]

How does it relates to Eric Anholt's work? As the repository is from doe300

[andreano]

Sounds like a killer argument for the Pi to me. I've long wanted to try OpenCl. Performance is secondary.

[FLHerne]

How does it relates to Eric Anholt's work? As the repository is from doe300

He wrote:

The hardware isn't quite capable enough to be exposed as OpenCL or GL compute shaders (some research had been done into this, and the designers' conclusion was that the memory acccess support wasn't quite good enough to be useful). That leaves you with writing VC4 shaders in raw assembly, which I don't recommend.

So either this project can't fully succeed, or its developers found some solution that Eric and the Broadcom hardware team missed.

It may be that it's impossible to produce a fully-conformant OpenCL implementation, but they can get this close enough to work for some real-world cases?

Edit: It looks like that's the case:

The most notable features, which are not supported by the VC4CL implementation are...

[coder]

Please tell me VideoCore 5 can support OpenCL 2.0+. Nearly 10 years in, and we still need to get more OpenCL out into the world. Maybe it's still possible to get Nvidia back on the bandwagon.