How to use OpenCL on Android?

android opengl-es opencl gpgpu renderscript
Rodja picture Rodja · Jan 25, 2012 · Viewed 25.6k times · Source

For plattform independence (desktop, cloud, mobile, ...) it would be great to use OpenCL for GPGPU development when speed does matter. I know Google pushes RenderScript as an alternative, but it seems to be only be available for Android and is unlikely to be ever included in iOS.

Therefore I seek for a solution to execute OpenCL code within Android Apps.

Answer

prunge picture prunge · Feb 16, 2013

The only Android devices I know that support OpenCL are the ones based on the Mali T600 family of chips (article here). They have an OpenCL SDK. Apparently it is OpenCL 1.1 full profile as well.

The Nexus 10 is a device that uses such a chip. The Samsung Exynos 5 dual SoC uses a Mali T604, so anything using this supposedly could be used with the Mali T600 OpenCL SDK (havne't tried any of this myself).

The author of the OpenCL blog is trying to have a go with this, so it might be worth following his series of articles.

But, OpenCL support on Android is brand new (as of 16/2/2013) so, while great for experimentation, it might be worth being cautious until there is more support (who says how buggy the intitial support of OpenCL 1.1 is)

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