Date: 04/06/2012

OpenCL 1.1 conformance test passed by Vivante GC Cores

Vivante Corporation has announced Vivante GC Cores passed the Khronos Group OpenCL 1.1 Embedded Profile (EP) conformance test suite on Freescale's i.MX 6 platform. The GC Cores use the programmable ScalarMorphic architecture to accelerate parallel data workloads on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFLOPS) of computational performance. Vivante cores find their applications to speed up image processing, computer vision, analytics, augmented reality and gesture-motion tracking.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is an open industry standard API and framework used to program multiple devices including GPUs and CPUs, organized as part of a single computational platform. The API takes advantage of all resources to process the growing number of incoming data from multiple sources including cameras, sensors, IPUs and other complex data streams that require data or task parallelism. The standard targets a wide range of devices including smartphones, tablets, PCs and CE devices, to embedded applications like automotive ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System).

OpenCL uses the Vivante parallel execution SIMD engines to enhance computation density by performing massively parallel data processing on multiple data streams, across several compute engines. Each compute engine has its own ALU, including pipelined floating point (FP) and integer (INT) units for math operations, plus a special function unit (SFU) for transcendental operations. A parallel computation and associated series of operations is called a kernel, and the Vivante GC cores can execute thousands of parallel kernels in real-time.

"We are pleased that Vivante passed OpenCL 1.1 EP using GPU acceleration on Freescale's i.MX 6 triple-play graphics platform," said Rajeev Kumar, i.MX product line manager for Freescale Semiconductor. "OpenCL is a key industry resource for driving the next wave of mobile and embedded products. We are actively engaged in several OpenCL projects on i.MX 6, with leading customers and partners productizing this technology. Vivante's milestone has the potential to spur mass market adoption of OpenCL across our line of i.MX 6 processors."

"OpenCL is an area that has been tightly coupled with GPU development, so this evolution has been a natural extension of our core competence," said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante. "New innovations inside our GPUs that accelerate OpenCL include enhanced multi-level memory access support, synchronization, math functions, ULP precision and atomics. Our advantages in mobile GPU architectures give us the opportunity to bring high performance compute to low power form factors, without sacrificing computational performance or features."