Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Graphics Processing Unit supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, and OpenCL EP

I'm curious about what level of output this GPU can do -- are we looking at an OUYA competitor or bitcoin-miner, or is it only powerful enough for basic desktop acceleration?

View on HN

Going on the MX6 specs[1] and GFLOPS alone[2], it should be a bit faster than Ouya's Tegra for the cheapest option and handily beat it on the more expensive models. Bitcoin mining is out of the question - it's basically a tablet-class GPU.

GFLOPS isn't the whole picture of course, but my Google-fu is failing me at the moment.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX#i.MX6x_series [2]: http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/01/19/gpus-comparison-arm-m...

By the way, bitcoin can no longer be efficiently mined on GPUs since the network hashrate has been increasing tremendously with ASICs (tenfold growth in the past 6 months and continuing steadily)

Alas, the Vivante GC2000 cannot do bitcoin mining (not that you'd want to, anyway). The GPU can indeed do do OpenCL, but the maximum kernel size is limited whereas double-SHA1 requires quite a lot of operations.

It's more aimed at computer vision applications such as image filters for robotics.

FYI, I did some OpenCL tests and benchmarks on the GC2000 some time ago and reported about it here: https://blog.visucore.com/2013/3/12/opencl-on-i-mx6 . I'm also working on a reverse engineered open source driver for Vivante GPUs such as that in the i.mx6 (https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv).

Do any of the Arm chips that have GPUs that are OpenCL capable have the appropriate support software to enable you to actually use OpenCL in programs?

Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile), so don't expect to be able to run all current OpenCL code unmodified.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com