OpenCL?

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TK1
1

I have heard many different opinions about OpenCL support on the Jetson TK1.

Some say it will support it eventually and others say never…

I’d personally love if it supported it!

OpenCL + CUDA would be absolutely perfect!

Is it ever going to happen?

-Pyrex

2

I was asking this, and was told (by Nvidia employee):

This is unofficial, but OpenCL could be supported by Q2 2015.
Some of the Khronos employees are also Nvidia employees, which should help push the issue.

3

Sorry but I doubt you heard that from an NVIDIA employee. NVIDIA supports CUDA on the Jetson TK1 platform, CUDA is a powerful and flexible platform and programming model for developing parallel applications on the GPU. At this time OpenCL is not supported on Jetson TK1.

4

I would like to second the call for cross API support. I understand nVidia wants to promote their API but … there is so much code written for more open formats. I have many established openCL programs that I’m not going to bother learning CUDA even if it’s better in some way.

CUDA limits my coding freedom to nVidia hardware, nVidia supporting openCL expands my options to their hardware.

5

Being on the Khronos board means nothing really when it comes to actual implementation for the most part. Its just a standards committe… Microsoft is on the Khronos board, but they are not evangelizing OpenGL, they promote their api DirectX. As far as OpenCL goes, Nvidia have pretty much ‘*** the pooch’ ( sorry for the language, but it had to be said ) on this one. Of course they are going to promote CUDA, which from a business standpoint kind make sense. But when Ithink about it, it does really, since most user’s seems to prefer Nvidia GPU ( usually driver stability and a wider range of extensions and other feature ). So for ex. if a developer is dead set on using OpenCL for his/her Compute API, then Nvidia just lost a customer. This is all from a general point of view since I assume Nvidia has already done the market research to aid their decisions to pursue CUDA. In closing, in my eyes ( and most other engineers I interact with ), CUDA will always have its place in history as the first general purpose, easy to use compute api, so lets close that chapter and work to further OpenCL on all platforms.

6

Does anyone know if this time Jetson K1 supports OpenCL?

Thanks.

7

The question is somewhat ambiguous if one could say that or not direct…I guess what do you mean by support. I have no doubt that the hardware is more than capable to support OpenCL 1.2 or greater. However, that still does not give us a working solution as the hardware manufacture still has to provide the implementation. See my rant above. As of this post there is still no OpenCL implementation for the Jetson K1.