[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets...
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Raspberry Pi 4 achieves Vulkan 1.1 conformance, gets GPU
performance boost
 
Author : rcarmo
Score  : 280 points
Date   : 2021-10-30 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
 
web link (www.cnx-software.com)
w3m dump (www.cnx-software.com)
 
| rixrax wrote:
| What's the test software / benchmark I should use on Linux
| nowadays to measure (and compare) shader and raw GPU performance?
| That would ideally run under both X and Wayland?
 
  | arminiusreturns wrote:
  | I have always tended towards Phoronixs test suite
  | (https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/) but Im sure there are a
  | few specific to Vulkan around. Not sure about wayland.
 
  | fulafel wrote:
  | The application(s) you want to run is the best benchmark.
 
    | rixrax wrote:
    | Problem with this is that the application I have in mind
    | doesn't provide anything but perceptual feedback. I'd rather
    | have some cold numbers that are to some degree reproducible
    | and would give at least rough idea of the performance of
    | given HW+drivers+other-settings combination.
 
| handrous wrote:
| Just checked, looks like Vulcan under DRM on the Pi4 works, and
| at least some people in the Libretro ecosystem have already
| messed around with it, so this could benefit Lakka. Awesome.
| Maybe this'll mean getting to play with some decent CRT shaders
| on the Pi without an unacceptable performance hit, and/or getting
| to make better use of Retroarch's advanced input lag reduction
| features.
 
  | mewse-hn wrote:
  | If this could get playstation emulators using vulkan running at
  | decent frame rates that would be really, really awesome
 
  | willis936 wrote:
  | CRT Royale running 60 fps in a sub 15 W machine would be
  | impressive. 1080p would be nice, 1440p would be great, and 4K
  | would be best. The pi4 can output 4K60, but I really doubt it
  | can shove through that many simulated pixels.
 
| exabrial wrote:
| ugh, now if I could only buy a few haha
 
  | boromi wrote:
  | Seriously I had to pay 75$ to get one recently, which was
  | painful but I needed it.
 
    | juanse wrote:
    | Same here but with 10 units. Almost 100$ each.
 
  | GhettoComputers wrote:
  | What for? I'm sure you have some older computers that run much
  | better that you already have in your house. An APU would
  | trounce it. Pi feel like netbooks of desktop computers, the new
  | ones get extremely hot, I would expect it to require a heavy
  | heatsink and constantly spinning fan if you tried this.
 
    | lytedev wrote:
    | Better power efficiency
 
| ncmncm wrote:
| I guess this means you can use Kompute (kompute.cc) on RPi 4,
| now?
 
  | lucb1e wrote:
  | (A GPGPU framework, to save others a click.)
 
    | ncmncm wrote:
    | Except not a framework, it's just a library. You can use it
    | to do any of the stuff you would do with CUDA, about as fast,
    | but portably. #include it to accelerate your game's physics
    | engine, or whatever.
    | 
    | It doesn't say so at kompute.cc, but I found that it depends
    | on Vulkan 1.1.
 
| Factorium wrote:
| Could we see a portable Epic Games console, pugged directly into
| their store?
| 
| Like the Steam Deck, but better, since developers will get 88% of
| revenue instead of 65% on Steam.
 
  | LeoPanthera wrote:
  | The Steam Deck is a generic PC. It's not locked to the Steam
  | store. It's not even locked to the OS it comes with. You can
  | install the Epic store, or any other store, on it right now. If
  | you have one, anyway.
 
  | fortyseven wrote:
  | *slurp*
 
  | smoldesu wrote:
  | You can download EGS games on Linux just fine, so ostensibly
  | you could build one of these right now. Of course, you probably
  | wouldn't want to use ARM for a PC game console, but you're
  | welcome to try it.
 
| pengaru wrote:
| in TFA: s/Iglia/Igalia/
 
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| If only there was a world where Apple would sell M1 chips
| separately from their walled garden.
 
  | bla3 wrote:
  | The Pi has much better performance per dollar, which is a
  | metric that's important to some people too.
 
    | tinus_hn wrote:
    | Purchase dollar? Or energy dollar?
 
      | rbanffy wrote:
      | I don't think there's anything else on the planet that
      | rivals the performance per watt of the M1 family.
      | 
      | Also, the RPi's SoC is made in an older 28nm process
      | (that's one of the reasons why it's cheaper).
 
  | Rovanion wrote:
  | They won't. Their margins on the services side are obscene so
  | getting people into that ecosystem is worth much more than the
  | sales of some processors.
 
  | mirekrusin wrote:
  | Why? They gave "it's possible" proof. They rip benefits of
  | doing it first - all good. Now it's time for competition to
  | pick it up, possibly improve on it or fade away Intel style.
 
  | smoldesu wrote:
  | Also accepted would be a world where they just add Vulkan
  | support to their APUs already.
 
    | WithinReason wrote:
    | How about MoltenVK?
    | 
    | https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
 
      | smoldesu wrote:
      | It's fine, but it's frankly silly that you're forced to
      | translate a _free and open_ graphics API into a more
      | proprietary one. Compare that to something like DXVK, which
      | exists because Linux users cannot license DirectX on their
      | systems. MoltenVK exists simply because Apple thought
      | "let's not adopt the industry-wide standard for CG graphics
      | on our newer machines". Again, not bad, but a bit of a
      | sticky situation that is entirely predicated by technology
      | politics, not what's _actually possible_ on these GPUs.
 
        | tinus_hn wrote:
        | Is what is possible with Metal possible with GL though?
        | Both in performance and features? They didn't build Metal
        | just to be contrarian.
 
        | bzzzt wrote:
        | Metal was released a year before Vulkan. Apple just
        | didn't want to wait and decided to design their own
        | better than OpenGL API.
 
        | oynqr wrote:
        | Mantle was released ~1 year before Metal.
 
        | smoldesu wrote:
        | DirectX was released a decade before Vulkan, that didn't
        | stop manufacturers from including support for both so the
        | user could decide for themselves.
 
    | my123 wrote:
    | A fully compliant Vulkan implementation for M1 would come
    | with very surprising performance cliffs for a developer.
    | 
    | One of them:
    | https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/1244
 
      | WithinReason wrote:
      | And also potential optimisations that are not possible in
      | other GPUs:
      | 
      | https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_feature
      | s...
 
      | monocasa wrote:
      | That's pretty common for TBDRs. The tile is rendered into a
      | fixed size on chip buffer, and the driver has to split the
      | tile into multiple passes to fit all of the render target
      | data for nutty amounts of data coming out of the shader.
      | PowerVR works the same way (completely unsurprisingly).
 
      | fulafel wrote:
      | See this comment on that issue: https://github.com/KhronosG
      | roup/MoltenVK/issues/1244#issueco...
 
      | zamadatix wrote:
      | It'd be surprising if an architecture had 0 such surprises
      | and did everything Vulkan allows without any special
      | performance considerations vs another architecture.
 
  | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
  | Well, number one, why would they? Apple makes money by getting
  | consumers and locking them into their unicorns and rainbows
  | ecosystem where everything is perfect which makes consumers
  | comfortable spending boat loads of money, not by selling
  | commodity hardware.
  | 
  | Ecosystems with great UX and paid subscriptions plus a 30% cut
  | on all transactions are far more profitable than the margins
  | you make selling commodity hardware. Just ask famous phone
  | manufacturers like Siemens, Nokia and Blackberry why that is.
  | That's why SW dev salaries are much higher than HW dev salaries
  | as the former generates way more revenue than the latter.
  | That's why Apple doesn't roll out their own cloud datacenters
  | and instead just gets Amazon, Microsoft and Google to compete
  | against each other on pricing.
  | 
  | Apple only rolls out their solutions when they have an impact
  | on the final UX, like designing their own M1 silicon.
  | 
  | And number two, selling chips comes with a lot of hassle like
  | providing support to your partners like Intel and AMD do.
  | Pretty sure they don't want to bother with that.
  | 
  | Before they start selling chips I would rather they open
  | iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color
  | discrimination.
 
    | rafamaddd wrote:
    | > Before they start selling chips I would rather they open
    | iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color
    | discrimination.
    | 
    | Outside of the countries where iOS is on par with Android (I
    | think US, Canada and UK are the only ones, maybe also
    | Australia) in terms of popularity, I don't know or have seen
    | a single person using iMessage, of course there's a lot
    | people using iphone outside of the mentioned countries, but
    | absolutely nobody uses iMessage.
    | 
    | The whole discrimination of the color bubble seems to only
    | happen in those countries were iOS is the same or more
    | popular than android and people is actually using iMessage.
 
      | InvaderFizz wrote:
      | It's worse than that in the US. While iOS is a bit over
      | 50%, it's closing in on 90% for teens[0], where such
      | discrimination is most likely to occur. These numbers also
      | bode well for Apple's future market share as these teens
      | grow into adults.
      | 
      | 0: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-i-phone-ownership-
      | among...
 
        | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
        | It's getting similar in Europe for teens. I rarely see
        | them on public transport with anything other than an
        | iPhone.
 
      | rimliu wrote:
      | > but absolutely nobody uses iMessage
      | 
      | Uhm, iMessage works transparently. I just use Messages app,
      | if my recipient uses iPhone it get an iMessage, if they use
      | something else, they get SMS.
 
        | mcintyre1994 wrote:
        | Their point is that most people don't use the Messages
        | app to communicate with others. In the UK for example
        | WhatsApp is massively dominant.
 
    | rbanffy wrote:
    | > Before they start selling chips I would rather they open
    | iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color
    | discrimination.
    | 
    | When so many telcos charge outrageous prices for SMSs, it's a
    | useful feature.
 
    | IgorPartola wrote:
    | I agree with you right up to how exactly does the M1 chip
    | affect the final UX? A different keyboard, screen, touchpad,
    | etc. all make a difference but why does the chip make a
    | difference?
 
      | masklinn wrote:
      | > I agree with you right up to how exactly does the M1 chip
      | affect the final UX?
      | 
      | It allows apple to focus on what they want without being
      | limited by and two their hardware provider's strategy.
 
      | ArgyleSound wrote:
      | Power efficiency for one.
 
        | IgorPartola wrote:
        | Was there nobody else who made power efficient chips?
 
        | JiNCMG wrote:
        | Not in the x86 arena. Every time Apple gets involved with
        | a CPU developers (Motorola, IBM, Intel) their needs
        | splits from the developers desires. This time they
        | decided to go on their own (well after years of doing
        | this for the iPhone). Note: They have been involved in
        | the ARM CPU market since the days of the Newton.
 
      | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
      | _> how exactly does the M1 chip affect the final UX?_
      | 
      | Everything runs faster, cooler, quieter and battery lasts
      | longer. Is that not part of the product UX?
 
        | IgorPartola wrote:
        | That makes it sound like Intel, AMD, ARM, etc. we're
        | trying to build chips that run hotter and less
        | efficiently.
 
        | bzzzt wrote:
        | Seems like Intel really lost the plan there with every
        | new generation having just a few percent better
        | performance, trouble with moving to smaller nodes and the
        | enormous regression from spectre/meltdown.
        | 
        | The Apple chips are made for running macOS/iOS. Seems
        | there are some hardware instructions that are tailor made
        | for increasing the performance of Apple software so they
        | can make sure everything is working toward a common goal.
 
        | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
        | The end users don't care what brand of chip is under the
        | hood, or why the UX on Apple's implementation of Intel
        | chips sucked, they just know the new device has much
        | better UX overall due to the more powerful and more
        | efficient chip and will upgrade for that.
 
    | tinus_hn wrote:
    | > Before they start selling chips I would rather they open
    | iMessage to other platforms to eliminate the bubble color
    | discrimination
    | 
    | It's probably easier to just move to one of the 99% of
    | countries where nobody uses iMessage.
 
      | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
      | I already do, in Europe, where everyone and their mom uses
      | Facebook's WhatsApp for everything. While that evens the
      | playing field, I'm not sure I'd call trading a walled
      | garden for a spyware one a massive victory though.
 
        | tinus_hn wrote:
        | So who cares that a network nobody uses exists where only
        | people that have an Apple device can login?
 
        | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
        | Apparently teens and even some adults in the US where
        | they'll miss out on social activities or be mocked or
        | ignored due to not being on iMessage.
        | 
        | That doesn't affect me though as i don't live in the US
        | and am too old for that kind of stuff but I do remember
        | how easy it was to be mocked or bullied as a teen for not
        | having the same stuff as the herd, even before
        | smartphones were a thing.
 
  | NelsonMinar wrote:
  | Or alternately one where some Windows / Linux manufacturer
  | could match Apple for all the innovations in the M1 Macbooks.
  | I'm not an Apple fan but I'm envious of what they've
  | accomplished and wish I could run Windows and Linux on similar
  | hardware.
  | 
  | Other folks are starting to get there but only from the mobile
  | device direction, e.g. Tensor. Maybe I should look closer at
  | what Microsoft has done with ARM Surface.
 
    | smoldesu wrote:
    | It doesn't help that Apple bought the entire manufacturing
    | capacity for 5nm silicon from TSCM right before the chip
    | shortage hit. I think the next few years are going to get
    | very competitive though, and I'm excited to see how Intel and
    | AMD respond.
 
      | phkahler wrote:
      | Apple has done that before. IIRC when the original iPod
      | came out it used a new generation of HDD. Apple went to the
      | drive manufacturer and said "we'll take all of them" and
      | they agreed.
 
      | taf2 wrote:
      | How is Amazon able to product their arm chips for aws?
      | Assuming those are not the 5nm?
 
        | smoldesu wrote:
        | There's still 5nm silicon for sale, but just not at TSCM
        | (the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world).
        | Companies like Samsung are just now getting around to
        | mass-producing 5nm, and afaik there were a few domestic
        | Chinese manufacturers who claimed to be on the node too.
        | 
        | As for Amazon specifically though, I've got no idea.
        | They're a large enough company that they could buy out an
        | entire fab or foundry if they wanted, AWS makes more than
        | enough money to cover the costs.
 
  | jeffbee wrote:
  | The "walled garden" comes with a C and C++ toolchain, python,
  | perl, awk, sed, and a Unix shell. It is not, in any way, a
  | "walled garden" in a universe where words have shared meaning.
 
    | aftbit wrote:
    | Its a walled garden when you're not allowed to leave or bring
    | your friends in, no matter how nice the stuff on the inside
    | is.
 
      | jeffbee wrote:
      | And that analogy applies to macOS and the M1 CPU how,
      | exactly?
 
      | rimliu wrote:
      | What does it even mean?
 
  | monocasa wrote:
  | I'm hoping Alyssa Rosenzweig's fantastic work documenting the
  | M1 GPU will let us write native Vulkan drivers even for MacOS.
  | I believe she's been focusing thus far on the user space
  | visible interfaces, so a lot of that work should translate
  | well.
 
  | snvzz wrote:
  | No worries. Competition is coming.
  | 
  | https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFive-P...
  | 
  | Should be roughly M1 performance, but on RISC-V.
 
    | rafamaddd wrote:
    | uffff
    | 
    | who knows when that is coming and when are we going to be
    | able to buy regular laptops from e.g. Lenovo, HP, Acer, etc
    | with that.
    | 
    | By the time that happens, Apple may already be on their
    | third, fourth? generation on M1. Which is going to much much
    | much faster than M1.
 
    | phkahler wrote:
    | M1 is WAY faster than a cortex A78.
 
| marcodiego wrote:
| Now combine this with Zink and boom! We get OpenGL 4.6 for free:
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-Clo... .
| 
| Vulkan is too low level, but AFAICS it is not something one use
| directly, instead a library which uses it as a back-end should be
| used.
 
  | kcb wrote:
  | I've always wondered how this would work. Surely if it was
  | possible to reasonably implement OpenGL 4.6 on the PI GPU it
  | would already be done through Mesa.
 
  | my123 wrote:
  | > Now combine this with Zink and boom! We get OpenGL 4.6 for
  | free
  | 
  | For the RPi4 specifically:
  | 
  | That GPU has hardware limitations that make it unable of OpenGL
  | 3.0. However, it supports GLES 3.2.
  | 
  | If you want GL desktop minus the unsupported features by the
  | hardware, you can set MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3 for example.
  | That will however never be compliant.
  | 
  | Vulkan has many extensions to allow it to work on hardware
  | which doesn't support the full feature set. (by not
  | implementing them, instead of having only version numbers)
 
    | zamadatix wrote:
    | The Pi hardware may not support multiple render targets or
    | other features in hardware directly but Zink is not required
    | to (and does not always) emit 1 Vulkan API call for each
    | OpenGL API call. It is free to issue as many as are needed to
    | properly emulate the OpenGL API in a conformant way. That
    | being said I don't think this particularly compatibility is
    | in Zink today but there is nothing preventing it from being
    | possible just because the hardware couldn't create the render
    | targets all in one shot.
 
      | seba_dos1 wrote:
      | > but Zink is not required to (and does not always) emit 1
      | Vulkan API call for each OpenGL API call
      | 
      | The OpenGL driver also doesn't have to emit 1 logical
      | hardware operation for each OpenGL API call.
 
        | zamadatix wrote:
        | There is no hard technical requirement for hardware
        | drivers but it's riskier to expose performance impacting
        | emulation at that level vs the layered driver level
        | (where Zink is). For instance imagine a case where the
        | hardware supported 4 MRTs but the hardware driver
        | emulation layer exposed 8 MRTs for OpenGL compatibility
        | yet Zink needed to use 16 MRTs. Now you've got all sorts
        | of translation happening where Zink is likely calling the
        | lower emulation layer multiple times rather than just
        | calling the hardware directly. Such emulation layers are
        | expected in a layered driver, that's part of their actual
        | intent, whereas base hardware drivers are meant to expose
        | what the hardware is able to do natively and let you work
        | around it otherwise.
 
        | seba_dos1 wrote:
        | You can already enjoy stuff like OpenGL 2.1 support on
        | purely GLES 2.0 hardware this way - for instance on older
        | Raspberry Pis. There's not much Zink will bring on the
        | table that Gallium doesn't already when it comes to
        | emulation of missing hardware features (at least not if
        | you want them to actually perform in any reasonable way).
 
    | jdc wrote:
    | I wonder what specifically the GPU missing that OpenGL needs.
 
      | my123 wrote:
      | The OpenGL 3.0 spec mandates support for 8 render targets,
      | the RPi4 GPU only has support for 4.
 
        | salawat wrote:
        | When you say render targets, do you mean drm buffers? Or
        | on GPU output buffers?
        | 
        | I'm not quite completely clueless, but I have the feeling
        | that clarification on this point will nudge me in the
        | right direction to understanding these things better.
 
        | my123 wrote:
        | GL_MAX_DRAW_BUFFERS
 
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Congrats! Huge effort. Full spec of Broadcomm GPU (24 GFLOPS)
| 
| https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=244519
 
| prox wrote:
| I wonder if a Raspberry GPU board (low cost graphics performance)
| is possible. For light Blender work and maybe simple games.
 
  | my123 wrote:
  | It's better even in GPU perf/$ to buy a Jetson Nano 2GB, the
  | RPi4 GPU is really small (and not that well featured).
 
    | amelius wrote:
    | But you can only run one flavor of Linux on it, since NVidia
    | keeps the specs closed.
 
      | my123 wrote:
      | Today on the Jetson Nanos, you can just use the Fedora
      | stock image. (flashed to a microSD card)
      | 
      | It's much better than what it was before. nouveau works
      | ootb, including reclocking too.
      | 
      | It's also to be noted that all Tegras have an open-source
      | kernel mode GPU driver (nvgpu) even when using the
      | proprietary stack. However, that driver isn't in an ideal
      | state today.
 
    | numpad0 wrote:
    | FP32 GFLOPS, ballparks from random sources:
    | 
    | - this: 24
    | 
    | - Ryzen 5600g: 200(CPU)
    | 
    | - Jetson nano: 235
    | 
    | - GeForce GT1030: 1127
    | 
    | - Ryzen 3rd IGP: 2100
    | 
    | - Apple M1X: 5200
    | 
    | - Apple M1 Pro: 10400
    | 
    | - RTX3080: 35580
    | 
    | 1030 can be had for $110 even at this height of GPU
    | shortages, not that much more than a Nano. hmm
 
    | prox wrote:
    | Wow that's an interesting device! Thanks!
 
    | krallja wrote:
    | The Jetson Nano uses a very similar SoC to the Nintendo
    | Switch, so you can expect similar performance.
 
      | JustFinishedBSG wrote:
      | It uses half a switch SoC GPU wise
 
        | GhettoComputers wrote:
        | All versions? Would be cool to use a hacked switch
        | running linux instead of Jetson if the performance was
        | that much better.
 
        | my123 wrote:
        | 921.6MHz is the GPU clock on Jetson Nano (at MAXN).
        | 
        | For the Switch:
        | 
        | > The GPU cores are clocked at 768 MHz when the device is
        | docked, and in handheld mode, fluctuating between the
        | following speeds: 307.2 MHz, 384 MHz, and 460 MHz
 
| StreamBright wrote:
| This is great for many reasons.
| 
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ilcw2f/p_v...
 
| causi wrote:
| I wonder if we'll see any impacts from this on the Pi 4
| applications that are presently borderline when it comes to
| performance, like N64 emulation.
 
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(page generated 2021-10-30 23:00 UTC)