May 29, 2012 -- Vivante Corp. today announced that Vivante GC Cores passed the Khronos Group OpenCL 1.1 Embedded Profile (EP) conformance test suite on the Freescale (FSL) i.MX 6 platform. The GC Cores use the latest programmable ScalarMorphic architecture to accelerate parallel data workloads on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFlops) of computational performance. Applications taking advantage of Vivante cores to significantly speed-up processing includes image processing, computer vision, analytics, augmented reality and gesture-motion tracking.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is an open industry-standard API and framework used to program multiple devices including GPUs and CPUs, organized as part of a single computational platform. The API takes advantage of all resources to efficiently process the growing number of incoming data from multiple sources including cameras, sensors, IPUs and other complex data streams that require data or task parallelism. The standard targets a wide range of devices including smartphones, tablets, PCs and CE devices, to embedded applications such as automotive ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System).

OpenCL uses the Vivante parallel-execution SIMD engines to enhance computation density by performing massively parallel data processing on multiple data streams, across several compute engines. Each compute engine has its own ALU, including pipelined floating-point (FP) and integer (INT) units for math operations, plus a special function unit (SFU) for transcendental operations. A parallel computation and associated series of operations is called a kernel, and the Vivante GC cores can execute thousands of parallel kernels in real-time.

"OpenCL is a key industry resource for driving the next wave of mobile and embedded products," said Rajeev Kumar, i.MX Product Line Manager for Freescale Semiconductor. "We are actively engaged in several OpenCL projects on i.MX 6, with leading customers and partners productizing this technology. Vivante's milestone has the potential to spur mass market adoption of OpenCL across our line of i.MX 6 processors."

About Freescale i.MX 6 processors

Integrating one, two or four ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1.2GHz each, the i.MX 6 series of processors delivers outstanding performance in a range of end-devices. Scalability across single-, dual- and quad-core products is a hallmark of the i.MX 6 series. Common SOC IP building blocks enable series-wide software and development tool compatibility, while integrated power-management capabilities, a broad range of integrated I/Os, and pin compatibility within package families reduce overall product complexity and development costs.