Vivante got into the news with OpenCL, when winning in the automotive-industry from NVIDIA. Reason: the car-industry wanted an open standard. They have support for:
- OpenCL
- OpenGL
- Google RenderScript
OpenCL
See Vivante’s GPGPU-page for more info, where below table is taken from.
| GC800 Series | GC1000 Series | GC2000 Series | GC4000 Series | GC5000 Series | GC6000 Series | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clock Speed MHz | 600 – 800 | 600 – 800 | 600 – 800 | 600 – 800 | 600 – 800 | 600 – 800 |
| Compute Cores | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 4 | Up to 8 |
| Shader Cores | 1 (Vec-4) 4 (Vec-1) | 2 / 4 (Vec-4) 8 / 16 (Vec-1) | 4 (Vec-4) 16 (Vec-1) | 8 (Vec-4) 32 (Vec-1) | 8 (Vec-4) 32 (Vec-1) | 16 (Vec-4) 64 (Vec-1) |
| Shader GFLOPS | 6–8 (High) 12–16 (Medium) | 11–30 (High) 22–60 (Medium) | 22–30 (High) 44–60 (Medium) | 44–60 (High) 88–120 (Medium) | 44–60 (High) 88–120 (Medium) | 88–118 (High) 176–236 (Medium) |
| GPGPU Options | Embedded Profile | Embedded Profile | Embedded / Full Profile | Embedded / Full Profile | Embedded / Full Profile | Embedded / Full Profile |
| Cache Coherent | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
One big advantage Vivante claims to have over the competition, is the GFLOPS/mm2. This could be of advantage to win the 1TFLOPS-war over their competition (which they’ve entered). The upcoming GC4000 series can push around 48GFLOPS, leaving the 1TFLOPS to the GC6000 series.
Their GPUs are sold as IP to CPU-makers, so they don’t sell their own chips. Vivante has created the GPU-drivers, but you have to contact the chip-maker to obtain them.
Freescale i.MX6
The i.MX6 Quad (4 ARM Cortex-A9 cores) and i.MX6 Dual (2 ARM Cortex-A9 cores) have support for OpenCL 1.1 EP (Embedded Profile). (source)
Both have a Vivante GC2000 GPU, which has 16 GFLOPS to 24 GFLOPS depending on the source. The GPU cores can be used to run OpenGL 2.0 ES shaders and OpenCL EP kernels.
Board: SABRE
There are several boards available. Freescale suggests to use the SABRE Board for Smart Devices ($399).
This Linux board support package including OpenCL drivers and general BSP documentation is available for free download on the product page under Software & Tools tab.
Other Boards
Alternative evaluation boards from 3rd parties can be found by searching on internet for “i.MX6Q board” as there are many! For instance the Wandboard (i.MX6Q, $139, shown at the left – was tipped that the Dual is actually a Duallite and thus not have support!!).
OpenCL-driver found on the Wandboard Ubuntu-image – download clinfo-output here (gcc clinfo.c -lOpenCL -lGAL).
Drivers & SDK
Under the Software & Tools tab of the SABRE-board there are drivers – they have not been tested with other boards, so no guarantees are given.
Most information is given in Get started with OpenCL on Qualcomm i.MX6.
- IMX6_GPU_SDK: a collection of GPU code samples, for OpenCL the work is still in progress. You can find it under “Software Development Tools” -> “Snippets, Boot Code, Headers, Monitors, etc.”
- IMX_6D_Q_VIVANTE_VDK_<version>_TOOLS: GPU profiling tools, offline compiler and an emulator with CL support which runs on Windows platforms. Be sure you pick the latest version! You can find it under “Software Development Tools” -> “IDE – Debug, Compile and Build Tools“.
More info
Check out the i.MX-community. You can also contact us for more info.
To see a great application with 4 i.MX6 Quad boards using OpenCL, see this “Using i.MX6Q to Build a Palm-Sized Heterogeneous Mini-HPC” project.
