GitHub - brucehoult/k3_ai: Utility to start a program on the A100 "AI" cores on SpacemiT K3 machines. · GitHub
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brucehoult
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Run command on K3's AI cores
Utility to run a command with arguments on the A100 "AI" cores on SpacemiT K3.
Quick start
$ git clone https://github.com/brucehoult/k3_ai<br>$ cd k3_ai<br>$ make<br>$ ai bash
Usage
ai cmd arg1 arg2 ...
aix path arg1 arg2 ...
Normally prefer to use ai. This is a shell script that converts a bare program name to the absolute path<br>of the executable and then chains to aix. It's about 1ms slower than calling aix directly.
aix is a tiny assembly language program that needs the absolute or relative path of the program to run.<br>It is written to be pure asm using only syscalls, no libraries, no dynamic linker, so as to be<br>really sure that nothing has used any RVV instructions in this process, and therefore no<br>decisions have been made based on the X100 core's shorter VLEN.
Examples
# just run a single program on the A100 cores<br>ai as hello.s -o hello.o
# same thing but maybe 1ms faster<br>aix /usr/bin/as hello.s -o hello.o
# run a whole build. All processes started by `make` will run on the A100 cores.<br>ai make -j8 test
# start a shell on the A100 cores. All programs run from it will be run only on the A100 cores<br>ai bash
Why you need it
The K3 has eight high performance Out-of-Order X100 cores with RISC-V vector length of 256 bits.<br>These cores are what all normal Linux programs run on.
There are also eight lower performance in-order A100 "AI" cores similar to the X60 cores in the<br>SpacemiT K1/M1 chips, but with long 1024 bit vector registers and ALU.
The "AI" cores can actually run all normal Linux programs. On standard scalar code they have<br>approximately 40% the performance of the main X100 cores, but on certain kinds of vectorised<br>code (for example Llama) they have considerably higher performance.
Even ignoring vectorised code, the A100 cores by themselves have more computing power than<br>any previous RISC-V computer under $1000, including those using the Allwinner D1, StarFive JH7110,<br>THead TH1520, SpacemiT K1/M1, or even Eswin EIC7700x.
As such, it is well worth using the A100 cores to run normal programs and adding 40% to the<br>overall power of a K3 computer.
Because of the different vector length, it is dangerous to move a program between X100 and A100<br>cores -- in either direction -- once it has been started.
SpacemiT provides a mechanism to move an existing running program from the X100 cores to the<br>A100 cores by writing the PID of the process to /proc/set_ai_thread but that is dangerous<br>depending on what that process has already done.
This utility creates a new process and then moves it to the A100 cores before it has done<br>anything dangerous, and then does EXEC() on the program you really wanted to run.
About
Utility to start a program on the A100 "AI" cores on SpacemiT K3 machines.
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MIT license
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Assembly<br>66.4%
Shell<br>23.1%
Makefile<br>10.5%
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