Because I am a sucker for Linux SBCs, I got myself a Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A RISCV SBC. And remarkably, it can do OpenCL too! Which means I can try my Photon-Mapping CL kernel on it.
Even though it can run OpenCL kernels, I did find that the OpenCL implementation is not the most stable one: As soon as I try to fill a buffer with clEnqueueFillBuffer() it will crash.
The performance of my kernel on this SBC was incredibly bad though: three orders of a magnitude slower than a desktop GPU. Which made me wonder what the performance would be on my Raspberry Pi 400.
Eben Upton designed the VideoCore IV GPU in the original rPi. So surely, the software support should be excellent. Sadly, there is no OpenCL for the rPi4.
CLVK to the rescue! This sofware will translate OpenCL kernels to Vulkan compute kernels. Even though RaspberryPi OS would not work with it, Ubuntu 23.04 for rPi would, as it had a newer Mesa.
Which brings us to the next disappointment: even though there is a Vulkan driver for the rPi4, this driver lacks important Vulkan extensions. It cannot handle 16-bit floats, nor can it handle 8-bit ints.
unknown NIR ALU inst: vec1 16 div ssa_217 = b2f16! ssa_182
This leaves us with a rather lacking implementation. Since I wrote my Photon Mapper for FP16, this experiment has to be shelved.
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