
Vortex: OpenCL Compatible RISC-V GPGPU - pjmlp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12151
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muizelaar
The code is maybe at:
[https://github.com/felsabbagh3/Vortex](https://github.com/felsabbagh3/Vortex)

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algorithm314
An other RISCV GPU from Think Silicon [https://think-
silicon.com/2019/12/02/think-silicon-demonstra...](https://think-
silicon.com/2019/12/02/think-silicon-demonstrates-early-preview-of-industrys-
first-risc-v-isa-based-3d-gpu-at-the-risc-v-summit/)

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fulafel
Isn't OpenCL just a c-like language that can run/be impemented on most things,
what about the RISC-V architecture prevented running eg POCL?

edit: seems the paper is mostly about adding SIMT support to RISC-V, proably
the answer to the above is that it RISC-V can run OpenCL even without the
extension.

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lwb
Anyone here use OpenCL for their day job? Practically speaking, what are the
use cases for it in a corporate environment?

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bubblethink
It's like CUDA, but not owned by NVIDIA. AMD's entire ROCM stack is based on
OpenCL. That means that if you run tenserflow on amd gpus, you are using
OpenCL. By corporate environment, if you mean day to day IT, probably none.
It's useful for high performance and parallel code.

~~~
rrss
Pretty sure the rocm backend for tensorflow uses hip, not OpenCL, and hip is
basically just AMD's implementation of cuda.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the "entire ROCM stack is based on
OpenCL." The rocm stack supports OpenCL, but it also supports hip, which is
what AMD chose to use to implement many of the new libraries in the rocm
platform (rocBLAS, rocFFT, rccl; replacing cuBLAS, cuFFT, nccl)

FWIW, rocm also doesn't support OpenCL 2.0.

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jarrell_mark
Deep Learning could in theory run on this using Intel PlaidML's Keras
implementation in OpenCL
[https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml](https://github.com/plaidml/plaidml)

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MeteOzturk
I am curious how RISC-V GPGPU development would affect Nvidia’s support for
the platform. So far they seemed to be supportive. They’ve contributed NVDLA.
They’re a member of the foundation. It’s not far-fetched to think a Jetson
with high performance RISC cores is already in development. I hope they won’t
back out if they deem a strong edge platform competitor is not in their best
interest.

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zozbot234
nVidia are not using RISC-V for their "high-performance" GPGPU cores. Their
interest in RISC-V is only for support cores, so GPGPU support is neither here
nor there.

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MeteOzturk
What Nvidia brings to the table with both the Jetson line and the Tegra line
is precisely those GPGPU's. The ARM parts are pretty standard I believe. What
I meant was if there was enough interest and development around an open-source
architecture for GPGPU's and Neural processing it would have the potential to
become a competitor to Nvidia's offering. I am confident it would take years
to become a worthy competitor in the desktop and server markets. Edge and
portable devices I am not so sure.

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microcolonel
> _The ARM parts are pretty standard I believe._

Not sure exactly what you're saying here, but NVIDIA's cores are bottom-up
custom, and they are very unusual.

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conradev
The older Jetson units featured standard Cortex-A57 processors and the newer
units have their custom processors (Denver and Carmel architectures)

