Is Rockchip's stuff "good", as NPUs go? I'm thinking of buying another 3588 SoC for my robotics hobby - you seem like you'd know if that's a decent idea or not.
Anyway, I really don't recommend it, unless you're making your own model, you know before-hand what's supported and what isn't, and your input is fixed resolution (which is a pretty fair usage in an embedded system) (fixed = doesn't change at every frame. handling hotplug from one webcam with a resolution to another with another resolution is fine)
I think looking at the examples give you a reasonable show of what it can do: https://github.com/rockchip-linux/rknn-toolkit/tree/master/e... It's mobilenet, yolov3, resnet50. There aren't more examples because they didn't had more examples. There aren't more examples because that's pretty much all you can reasonably run.
As far as I can tell, modern image models using transformer/vit won't be runnable on it. (it acts enough as a coprocessor that it's possible to do some parts in CPU some parts in NPU - and Rockchip framework handles that -, so maybe it's somehow possible)
(Note: I say this as a huge Rockchip lover, their mainline support is top-notch, they make very durable product (their 2015's RK3288 is still far from obsolete), and I bought a RK3588 SBC to play with a NPU accelerator (whose full specification is publicly available btw), in the hope to have a self-hosted LLM voice assistant)
Curious if anyone can weigh in on their SW usability. A quick search for their user level tools showed examples/documentation in Chinese(?)
I do know they have their own special sauce to talk to the NPU. I was discouraged from making the effort myself because their special sauce to talk to the VPU has barely any ffmpeg support, it p much only uses gstreamer, and I'm neither a masochist nor French so that's a non-starter.
By VPU are you talking about stuff like ISP, video encoder/decoder, or something else?
Among embedded processors I’ve seen touting vision acceleration, gstreamer support is fairly widespread. I bit the bullet to learn it because my role requires it. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome talking, but I’ve somehow grown to like gstreamer. The learning curve was awkward. I struggled with documentation and learned more by analyzing some examples and trial-and-error.
Oh no. The prospect of gstreamer being the only way... Oh no.
Maybe there's a zsh plugin or smth that autocompletes sane defaults? AAAAAAAAHHHHHH there surely isn't, anyone merciful enough to make one would just use ffmpeg instead...