AI Processing Unit "APU" Driver For Linux DRM Is Among The Latest Accelerator Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AI Processing Unit "APU" Driver For Linux DRM Is Among The Latest Accelerator Drivers

Sent out last week by Alexandre Bailon with Bay Libre is the AI Processing Unit "APU" Direct Rendering Manager driver to interface between CPUs and AI Processing Units. The hope is this APU driver could be re-used by various hardware drivers while the initial focus is on bringing up the AI capabilities of the MediaTek MT8183 SoC...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-DRM-APU-Driver-Patches

[skeevy420]

Seeing as how AMD started their APU thing over a decade ago, how hard would have AIPU been to come up with? It took me less than 5 seconds. It's like people forget that A and I in AI are already an acronym that could have been prepended or appended to an existing acronym. They didn't have to muddle it up with yet another reused acronym.

[cewbdex]

Seeing as how AMD started their APU thing over a decade ago, how hard would have AIPU been to come up with? It took me less than 5 seconds. It's like people forget that A and I in AI are already an acronym that could have been prepended or appended to an existing acronym. They didn't have to muddle it up with yet another reused acronym.

I agree it's not clever to name something with a name that's already used, just poor marketing, NPU could fit better, but not sure if it does the same thing.

[tildearrow]

So APU may stand for three things:

- Audio Processing Unit
- Accelerated Processing Unit
- AI Processing Unit

I wonder why couldn't they go for AIPU...

[brucethemoose]

An interesting note, the backend AMD is using for their (Windows) demo: https://github.com/amd/RyzenAI-cloud...demo/tree/main

Is some version of this Xilinx API: https://github.com/Xilinx/Vitis-AI

And I assume that would be a user of this kernel driver? Or do they have some "special" way to talk to the hardware on linux since they are AMD.

[lowflyer]

So APU may stand for three things:

- Audio Processing Unit
- Accelerated Processing Unit
- AI Processing Unit

I wonder why couldn't they go for AIPU...

just adding "Auxiliary Power Unit" which is used throughout commercial aviation.