On NEON vs OpenCL
So I just reached a 'have output' milestone on some code i'm working on and I was reflecting on how much effort it was to code a similar algorithm in NEON in assembly language compared to OpenCL on a GPU.
In my case, NEON comes out on top in terms of 'developer productivity'.
- Mistakes crash a process - not your computer.
- Easier to debug in gdb (I know there are OpenCL device debuggers now, but not when I started).
- Better libraries.
- Not portable - but OpenCL isn't portable between device-classes either, and isn't available on every system.
- Easier memory management - it's just the same as C.
- Easier to bind with C code - it's just the same as C.
- Very low call overhead.
The last two points are quite significant. Because of the overheads of OpenCL you're forced to put big chunks of complex algorithm onto the device - not to mention the hairy code required to get good performance out of not-trivially-parallel tasks.
With NEON you only need to code the stuff that runs slower than it should in C (and despite all the years of compiler advances, there's still a lot of code like this), and just leave the complex business logic and outer loops to the compiler (it usually does an ok job at that). Even without resorting to exotic bit manipulation and in-register lookup-tables, such a simple operation as a "float - scale - clamp - byte conversion" (as typically encountered in image processing) is several times faster via NEON than in C, and not a lot harder to write.
It helps that NEON has a nice orthogonal instruction set with sane mnemonics and a healthy register count, unlike some other crap one could mention ...
Pity it's still slow!
The main issue is of course that these CPU's are pretty gutless, and you can't get the sort of performance you can out of a desktop machine, let alone a GPU (but those can't fit in your pocket either). Of course, this is the type of problem the parallella project is trying to address - but they seem to be having a bit of a kickstarter melt-down and haven't updated their project in a few days. Well one hopes the publicity gained helps them get something going anyway even if this particular effort fails.
Update: Well Adapteva finally put some more stuff up. I guess going for the 'cheaper/faster beagleboard' type thing is better than their original approach, even if it de-emphasises the parallel nature somewhat. Whether it's that or the request for more noise, it seems to be picking up a good amount, although $200K in 2 days is a big ask.