Etnaviv NPU update 11: Now twice as fast!

Progress

 

This update's highlight is that last week I finally got the TP jobs working, which allows us to make the tensor manipulation in the HW, removing 18ms from the tensor preprocessing. We can currently use them for transposing tensors from the format that TensorFlow prefers to that which the HW expects and the other way around, and for lowering strided convolutions to regular ones.

 

This makes our image classification benchmark twice as fast, as expected:

tomeu@arm-64:~/mesa$ ETNA_MESA_DEBUG=ml_msgs python3.10 classification.py -i grace_hopper.bmp -m mobilenet_v1_1.0_224_quant.tflite -l labels_mobilenet_quant_v1_224.txt -e libteflon.so
Loading external delegate from build/src/gallium/targets/teflon/libteflon.so with args: {}
Running the NN job took 13 ms.
0.866667: military uniform
0.031373: Windsor tie
0.015686: mortarboard
0.007843: bow tie
0.007843: academic gown
time: 15.650ms

60 FPS is already quite interesting for many use cases, but the proprietary driver is able to do the same at around 8 ms, so there is still plenty of room for improvements.

 

Some preliminary testing indicates that enabling zero-run length compression in the weight buffers will make the biggest difference, so that is what I will be working on when I get back to performance work.

Additionally, I also got some experimental jobs running on the programmable core in this NPU, which will allow us to run more advanced models, which tend to use operations that the hardware couldn't be designed for back then.

Upstreaming is going well, those interested can follow it here:

 

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/25714.

 

Next steps

 

These will be my priorities during the next couple of weeks, in order:

1. Upstreaming
2. Get the Mobilenet SSD V1 model running on the HW, for object detection
   
3. Performance