Implement MoltenVK (enables Vulkan support for Mac OS/iOS)

[Aeroxander]

Detailed description

As Apple already deprecated OpenCL, the only way to use GPU acceleration in the future is either through the Intel OpenVINO (what only supports Intel GPU's) or through Vulkan with help of MultenVK.

MultenVK can automatically and transparently convert SPIR-V shaders to MSL at runtime with the help of the Runtime Shader Conversion.

The installation and usage is quite straight forward

OpenCV DNN will be the only framework next to Apple's own CoreML framework that can utilize Metal GPU acceleration, while OpenCV will also be compatible with other platforms!

As Vulkan support is still only experimental, I will try to implement MoltenVK and see if things work, if it does it will incentivize people to contribute to Vulkan support as it will also replace OpenCL on Mac.

There are only a few limitations with MoltenVK so it should be able to work.

[ludwig980]

Hi Aeroxander,

I'm interested in your progress with MoltenVK. Did you manage to get it working? I'm no expert in openCV development, but I'm willing to help if possible/needed.

Cheers

[Aeroxander]

Hey Ludwig!

Right now I'm trying out the TVM compiler to support Metal, nGraph/PlaidML should also support Metal, I don't have the time right now to add this feature to OpenCV right now.

[bhack]

Probably with Ngraph Backend + Plaidml when the MLIR rewriting is ready plaidml/plaidml#104

[avilleret]

Hi @Aeroxander,

any news on that ? is there any plan to support GPU acceleration on Apple's devices ?