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NVIDIA Tegra K1: First Mobile Chip With Hardware-Accelerated OpenCL
New submitter shervinemami writes (starting with a pretty big disclaimer: "I'm an Engineer at NVIDIA.") The latest CompuBench GPU benchmarks show NVIDIA's Tegra K1 running whole OpenCL algorithms around 5x faster than any other mobile device, and individual instructions around 20x faster! This huge jump is because mobile companies have been saying they support OpenCL on mobile devices since early 2013, but what they don't mention is that they only have software API support, not hardware-accelerated OpenCL running faster on their GPUs than CPUs. Now that NVIDIA's Tegra-K1 chip has started shipping in devices and thus is available for full benchmarking, it is clearly the only mobile chip that actually gives you proper hardware-accelerated OpenCL (and CUDA of course!).
The K1 is also what's in Google's Project Tango 3-D mapping tablet.
ALL it does is bark WTF?
I have the Asus Transformer Prime 201 with the Tegra 3 and it is/was a pretty damn good CPU. The tablet is still quite useful despite being a few years old. I skipped the Tegra 4s and have been waiting for K1 powered tablets. I do a fair bit of gaming on my tablet and I can't wait to see what developers do with the K1.
Does it have tools support for OpenCL? For Geforce there is no tools support and without it, and I've found out the hard way that it's too difficult to make it perform without proper insights that tools can give.
The Nexus 10 I purchased on launch day had a working OpenCL implementation. I ran some kernels on it and it was definitely GPU accelerated. A software update actually removed the CL driver later on as Google backtracked on CL support and began promoting their Renderscript instead.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
Also, the nVidia jetson-tk1 that I purchased does NOT have a working OpenCL implementation.
Look at the comments from the nvidia employee: http://devblogs.nvidia.com/par...
This article is just free advertising for nVidia, and its false information too!
They make great hardware, why do they have to be so damn dishonest all the time?
I really wanted to buy the Shield Tablet from you guys. It would be nice to have the play store built in and an actual warranty and support from an American company. But no, I had to order a Xiaomi MiPad from China just to get a usable aspect ratio. Can't wait for mine to come in the mail. I really didn't want to have to order an unsupported/semi-warrantied product from china with a 3rd party rom without full English support, but you guys just had to release another crappy, long, skinny oversized phone of a tablet.
When will you guys realize that nobody wants an oversized phone for a tablet? It's too short to use in landscape mode, especially with the on screen nav-keys and notification bar. Makes it unusable to use the web. And in portrait mode its just freaking awkward and not wide enough to show websites and articles well.
Yeah, widescreen works for phone. I hate Apple and would never buy an Apple product, but just admit they got the form factor for tablets right and bite off their swag.
At least the Chinese companies aren't afraid to say "if you can't beat em, join em". At least Xiaomi got it right.... Hopefully they can get the software hacked together so its usable at some point...
ALL it does is bark WTF?
You must have a defective version. Maybe you should take it to see a doctor.
Recent iPhones certainly have very powerful PowerVR GPUs, and Apple was the original creator of OpenCL. But can you show any benchmarks or proof that iPhone 5S allows GPU-accelerated OpenCL apps?
Look as much as I like the idea of competition. The "competion" is basically
Microsoft Surface, using an x86 Intel part and terrible battery life/touch screen, it's selling point is "it's still windows"
Android, which uses weak Mali cores or sometimes better Adreno (which were developed by ATI, before AMD bought them out) GPU cores. Android vendors only care about shipping quantity not quality.
Apple uses PowerVR cores which are at the top of all benchmarks, and still last half a day on a battery.
So along comes nVidia with this Tegra chip that nobody is using, so they put out their own game console that nobody wants. Everyone needs to learn the lesson of the Ouya, nobody will develop for devices that are easily hacked to play pirated software. Considering how difficult it is to develop for Android, may as well just develop for Apple, and only backport software after you've made enough money on the Apple site to warrant it. If there's no interest, don't bother. Nobody will develop for Android first because they need to make the software assets 3 times larger just to cover the different GPU types.
Serious question here, what is the point of OpenCL on mobile devices? Can websites use it? If apps can use it, what is it good for?
Does this mean that games will run faster than the gtx 790? Cool! now I just need an HD widescreen monitor.
Everyone needs to learn the lesson of the Ouya, nobody will develop for devices that are easily hacked to play pirated software.
Your claim means nobody will develop for PCs. Yet developers do in fact develop for PCs.
A number of mobile IHVs have had conformant OpenCL implementations for quite a while now. If your HW has back-end support for compute shaders then writing an OpenCL front-end for it isn't a big deal.
http://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products
What is the benefit of OpenCL on my phone? I can mine some bitcoins if I want to warm my pocket for an hour before the battery is dead?
TBH on the PC the only notable game with GPCPU was Civ5 for some insignificant texture compression thing AFAICT.
I love the tech, but in practice this isn't going to mean anything for nVidia.
NVIDIA is not supplying a proper OpenCL toolchain for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS-based developer's kit for the Jetson Tegra TK1 hardware. As a result, it is effectively not possible to develop OpenCL applications for the chip, unless you are a big enough operator to develop your own OpenCL compiler. If you click through to TFA, you will note that I pointed this out months ago. Claiming that OpenCL is properly supported for this hardware by NVIDIA is simply not true.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
OpenCL is not available on iOS. Nor does it look like it ever will be. Apple still promotes the OpenCL project, but for GPU compute on iOS devices they have indicated that they are putting their efforts behind their new Metal API, which is generic enough that it can be used for graphics or compute.
Google "do not be evil" single handedly decided that OpenCL will never run on Android and instead is pushing for their crappy alternative, RenderScript:
https://code.google.com/p/andr...
No matter how valid the arguments of those who favor OpenCL are, Google just answers with FUD.
You say that with a straight face? Nvidia is trying to promote CUDA and only reluctantly ever "does" OpenCL. So for Linux they don't even make drivers for OpenCL, only CUDA. How is that a "Linux OS related issue" and not an Nvidia not playing nice with OpenCL issue?
http://shop.intrinsyc.com/collections/qualcomm/products/mdp-tablet-powered-by-snapdragon-805-processor
http://shop.intrinsyc.com/products/snapdragon-800-series-apq8074-based-dragonboard-development-kit-1
All of these support OpenCL execution on the GPU (as does the older 8064 MDP tablet which is over two years old and isn't sold anymore). Note that the 8064 and 8074/8974 are not just available as a development boards - they have actually been in real non-development consumer devices for quite some time.