[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkan vs OpenCL and Alternatives

[Immanuel, Yehowshua U]

So one question that I’ve been thinking about is “how good is Vulkan” for GPGPU?

That is, how easy is it to express thing like matmul and dot in Vulkan?

How does it compare against OpenCL. From a practical standpoint, I think it makes more sense for us to support Vulkan since Apple, the original proponents of OpenCL withdrew their support from the standard a few years ago anyways. 

Also, will the LibreSOC “GPU” be able to execute OpenCL code? I imagine that we could compile OpenCL into SPIR-V and then perhaps have some SPIR-V driver evaluate the SPIR-V?

I bring all this up because, even though I favor Vulkan, many applications are still being written in OpenCL, and from a business customer perspective, I imagine that many of our potential customers are probably more familiar with OpenCL  - at least more so than Vulkan…

@Jacob - can I get your input on this - especially since you are working on the Vulkan drivers?

Yehowshua