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Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Open ARM GPU drivers


From: Andrew Back
Subject: Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Open ARM GPU drivers
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2013 07:43:03 +0000

On 31 January 2013 18:04, Dave Love <address@hidden> wrote:
> Michael Dorrington <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> As you may or may not be aware, the state of free video drivers on the
>> rising ARM architecture, found in mobile computers, is not good.  This
>> includes the Raspberry Pi which has what the makers call a free video
>> driver but really it's merely a shim layer to the real driverĀ¹.
>> Thankfully this is changing due to reverse engineering efforts:
>
> I'd be interested if anyone knows about the possibility of using the
> drivers for floating point work, presumably via OpenCL.  If so, what
> sort of performance might Mali 400, for instance, provide?  I couldn't
> find much relevant information even for proprietary drivers.

** Note: what follows is information on a project I'm involved with
and for hardware which is not generally available yet. Prototypes
recently shipped, the first 6,000+ boards will be going out to
Kickstarter backers and we don't have a date for post-Kickstarter
orders just yet... ***

You may also like to take a look at the Parallella board:

  http://www.parallella.org/board/

The 16-core Epiphany floating-point hardware provides 25 GFLOPS and
since its MIMD will be easier to program for a broader variety of uses
than a GPU. The architecture reference manual is available without
NDA:

  http://www.adapteva.com/support/docs/e3-reference-manual/

Supported by GCC as of 4.7.

There is also an LGPL v3 licensed OpenCL implementation:

  http://www.browndeertechnology.com/coprthr.htm

Plus there will be space on the FPGA provided by the Zynq SoC for
doing certain compute-intensive tasks in hardware, e.g. digital
down-conversion with software-defined radio. The HDL sources for the
ARM-Epiphany interface that is implemented in the FPGA will be
provided under (L)GPL.

The current prototypes are based on an off-the-shelf development board
plus daughtercard, but the final design (schematics + PCB layout) will
be provided under a liberal licence and almost certainly copyleft or
similar (I say similar because copyleft isn't as effective with
hardware).

Cheers,

Andrew

(Parallella project community lead)

-- 
Andrew Back
http://carrierdetect.com



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