Reverse-Engineered NPU Driver Tantalizingly Close To Proprietary Driver Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Reverse-Engineered NPU Driver Tantalizingly Close To Proprietary Driver Performance

When it comes to neural processing unit NPU/AI accelerators for Linux there is open-source options with the likes most notably of Intel-owned Habana Labs leading the way, Intel's iVPU driver for the NPU found within Meteor Lake SoCs, AMD recently posting a Ryzen AI Linux driver, etc. When it comes to reverse-engineered efforts, the Etnaviv project has expanded its scopes from just Vivante graphics IP to also embracing the Vivante NPU IP for running workloads like TensorFlow Lite. With the latest open-source achievements, the Etnaviv NPU performance is coming incredibly close to the proprietary and official driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vivante-Etnaviv-NPU-Close

[rcurious]

Incredible. Hope one day special trained LLM will help to reverse engineer all hardware drivers, for phones too, etc. So we will be able to run linux bare metal on them.

[stormcrow]

Some days I just want to shove all the acronyms in computer technology into a blender while yelling "DOES IT BLEND?"... It's almost certain what comes out would be more acronyms plus a few real words.

[avis]

Michael

Not strictly open source but available for Linux: RAR 7 is out: https://rarlab.com/