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# RISC-V 3D GPU

See [[libre_3d_gpu]]

at FOSDEM 2018 when Yunsup and the team announced the U540 there was
some discussion about this: it was one of the questions asked.  one of
the possibilities raised there was that maddog was heading something:
i've looked for that effort, and have not been able to find it [jon is
getting quite old, now, bless him.  he had to have an operation last
year.  he's recovered well].

also at the Barcelona Conference i mentioned in the
very-very-very-rapid talk on the Libre RISC-V chip that i have been
tasked with, that if there is absolutely absolutely no other option,
it will use Vivante GC800 (and, obviously, use etnaviv).  what *that*
means is that there's a definite budget of USD $250,000 available
which the (anonymous) sponsor is definitely willing to spend... so if
anyone can come up with an alternative that is entirely libre and
open, i can put that initiative to the sponsor for evaluation.

basically i've been looking at this for several months, so have been
talking to various people (jeff bush from nyuzi [1] and chiselgpu [2],
frank from gplgpu [3], VRG for MIAOW [4]) to get a feel for what would
be involved.

* miaow is just an OpenCL engine that is compatible with a subset of
  AMD/ATI's OpenCL assembly code.  it is NOT a GPU.  they have
  preliminary plans to *make* one... however the development process is
  not open.  we'll hear about it if and when it succeeds, probably as
  part of a published research paper.

* nyuzi is a *modern* "software shader / renderer" and is a
  replication of the intel larrabee architecture.  it explored the
  concept of doing recursive software-driven rasterisation (as did
  larrabee) where hardware rasterisation uses brute force and often
  wastes time and power.  jeff went to a lot of trouble to find out
  *why* intel's researchers were um "not permitted" to actually put
  performance numbers into their published papers.  he found out why :)
  one of the main facts that jeff's research reveals (and there are a
  lot of them) is that most of the energy of a GPU is spent getting data
  each way past the L2/L1 cache barrier, and secondly much of the time
  (if doing software-only rendering) you have several instruction cycles
  where in a hardware design you issue one and a separate pipeline takes
  over (see videocore-iv below)

* chiselgpu was an additional effort by jeff to create the absolute
  minimum required tile-based "triangle renderer" in hardware, for
  comparative purposes in the nyuzi raster engine research.  synthesis
  of such a block he pointed out to me would actually be *enormous*,
  despite appearances from how little code there is in the chiselgpu
  repository.  in his paper he mentions that the majority of the time
  when such hardware-renderers are deployed, the rest of the GPU is
  really struggling to keep up feeding the hardware-rasteriser, so you
  have to put in multiple threads, and that brings its own problems.
  it's all in the paper, it's fascinating stuff.

* gplgpu was done by one of the original developers of the "Number
  Nine" GPU, and is based around a "fixed function" design and as such
  is no longer considered suitable for use in the modern 3D developer
  community (they hate having to code for it), and its performance would
  be *really* hard to optimise and extend.  however in speaking to jeff,
  who analysed it quite comprehensively, he said that there were a large
  number of features (4-tuple floating-point colour to 16/32-bit ARGB
  fixed functions) that have retained a presence in modern designs, so
  it's still useful for inspiration and analysis purposes.  you can see
  jeff's analysis here [7]

* an extremely useful resource has been the videocore-iv project [8]
  which has collected documentation and part-implemented compiler tools.
  the architecture is quite interesting, it's a hybrid of a
  Software-driven Vector architecture similar to Nyuzi plus
  fixed-functions on separate pipelines such as that "take 4-tuple FP,
  turn it into fixed-point ARGB and overlay it into the tile"
  instruction.  that's done as a *single* instruction to cover i think 4
  pixels, where Nyuzi requires an average of 4 cycles per pixel.  the
  other thing about videocore-iv is that there is a separate internal
  "scratch" memory area of size 4x4 (x32-bit) which is the "tile" area,
  and focussing on filling just that is one of the things that saves
  power.  jeff did a walkthrough, you can read it here [10] [11]

so on this basis i have been investigating a couple of proposals for
RISC-V extensions: one is Simple-V [9] and the other is a *small*
general-purpose memory-scratch area extension, which would be
accessible only on the *other* side of the L1/L2 cache area and *ONLY*
accessible by an individual core [or its hyperthreads].  small would
be essential because if a context-switch occurs it would be necessary
to swap the scratch-area out to main memory (and back).
general-purpose so that it's useful and useable in other contexts and
situations.

whilst there are many additional reasons - justifications that make
it attractive for *general-purpose* usage (such as accidentally
providing LD.MULTI and ST.MULTI for context-switching and efficient
function call parameter stack storing, and an accidental
single-instruction "memcpy" and "memzero") - the primary driver behind
Simple-V has been as the basis for turning RISC-V into an
embedded-style (low-power) GPU (and also a VPU).

one of the things that's lacking from
[RVV](https://github.com/riscv/riscv-v-spec/blob/master/v-spec.adoc)
is parallelisation of
Bit-Manipulation.  RVV has been primarily designed based on input from
the Supercomputer community, and as such it's *incredible*.
absolutely amazing... but only desirable to implementt if you need to
build a Supercomputer.

Simple-V i therefore designed to parallelise *everything*.  custom
extensions, future extensions, current extensions, current
instructions, *everything*.  RVV, once it's been implemented in gcc
for example, would require heavy-customisation to support e.g.
Bit-Manipulation, would require special Bit-Manipulation Vector
instructions to be added *to RVV*... all of which would need to AGAIN
go through the Extension Proposal process... you can imagine how that
would go, and the subsequent cost of maintenance of gcc, binutils and
so on as a long-term preliminary (or if the extension to RVV is not
accepted, after all the hard work) even a permanent hard-fork.

in other words once you've been through the "Extension Proposal
Process" with Simple-V, it need never be done again, not for one
single parallel / vector / SIMD instruction, ever again.

that would include for example creating a fixed-function 3D "FP to
ARGB" custom instruction.  a custom extension with special 3D
pipelines would, with Simple-V, not need to also have to worry about
how those operations would be parallelised.

this is not a new concept: it's borrowed directly from videocore-iv
(which in turn probably borrowed it from somewhere else).
videocore-iv call it "virtual parallelism".  the Vector Unit
*actually* has a 4-wide FPU for certain heavily-used operations such
as ADD, and a ***ONE*** wide FPU for less-used operations such as
RECIPSQRT.

however at the *instruction* level each of those operations,
regardless of whether they're heavily-used or less-used they *appear*
to be 16 parallel operations all at once, as far as the compiler and
assembly writers are concerned.  Simple-V just borrows this exact same
concept and lets implementors decide where to deploy it, to best
advantage.


> 2. If it’s a good idea to implement, are there any projects currently
> working on it?

i haven't been able to find any: if you do please do let me know, i
would like to speak to them and find out how much time and money they
would need to complete the work.

>       If the answer is yes, would you mind mention the project’s name and
> website?
>
>       If the answer is no, are there any special reasons that nobody not
> implement it yet?

it's damn hard, it requires a *lot* of resources, and if the idea is
to make it entirely libre-licensed and royalty-free there is an extra
step required which a proprietary GPU company would not normally do,
and that is to follow the example of the BBC when they created their
own Video CODEC called Dirac [5].

what the BBC did there was create the algorithm *exclusively* from
prior art and expired patents... they applied for their own patents...
and then *DELIBERATELY* let them lapse.  the way that the patent
system works, the patents will *still be published*, there will be an
official priority filing date in the patent records with the full text
and details of the patents.

this strategy, where you MUST actually pay for the first filing
otherwise the records are REMOVED and never published, acts as a way
of preventing and prohibiting unscrupulous people from grabbing the
whitepapers and source code, and trying to patent details of the
algorithm themselves just like Google did very recently [6]

* [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z6xjIRXcp4
* [1] https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki
* [2] https://github.com/asicguy/gplgpu
* [3] https://github.com/jbush001/ChiselGPU/
* [4] http://miaowgpu.org/
* [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)
* [6] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/06/11/2159218/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-his-public-domain-work
* [7] https://jbush001.github.io/2016/07/24/gplgpu-walkthrough.html
* [8] https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/wiki/VideoCore-IV-Programmers-Manual
* [9] libre-riscv.org/simple_v_extension/
* [10] https://jbush001.github.io/2016/03/02/videocore-qpu-pipeline.html
* [11] https://jbush001.github.io/2016/02/27/life-of-triangle.html
* OpenPiton https://openpiton-blog.princeton.edu/2018/11/announcing-openpiton-with-ariane/

# News Articles

* <https://hub.packtpub.com/a-libre-gpu-effort-based-on-risc-v-rust-llvm-and-vulkan-by-the-developer-of-an-earth-friendly-computer/>
* <https://riscv.org/2018/10/packt-hub-article-a-libre-gpu-effort-based-on-risc-v-rust-llvm-and-vulkan-by-the-developer-of-an-earth-friendly-computer/>
* <https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/9jts9t/theres_a_new_libre_gpu_effort_building_on_riscv/>
* <https://www.linux.com/blog/2018/11/risc-v-linux-development-full-swing>
* <https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-GPU-RISC-V-Vulkan>
* <https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Mobilprozessor-mit-freier-GPU-Libre-RISC-V-M-Class-geplant-4242802.html>
* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18094734>
* <http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/116004>
* <https://linuxfr.org/users/martoni/journaux/risc-v-est-pret-pour-le-desktop>