Abstract-In this paper we evaluate the promise held by lowpower GPUs for non-graphic workloads that arise in embedded systems. Towards this, we map and implement 5 benchmarks, that find utility in very different application domains, to an embedded GPU. Our results show that apart from accelerated performance, embedded GPUs are promising also because of their energy efficiency which is an important design goal for battery-driven mobile devices. We show that adopting the same optimization strategies as those used for programming high-end GPUs might lead to worse performance on embedded GPUs. This is due to restricted features of embedded GPUs, such as, limited or no user-defined memory, small instruction-set, limited number of registers, among others. We propose techniques to overcome such challenges, e.g., by distributing the workload between GPUs and multi-core CPUs, similar to the spirit of heterogeneous computation.

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With the advent of low-power programmable compute cores based on GPUs, GPU-equipped heterogeneous platforms are becoming common in a wide spectrum of industries including safety-critical domains like the automotive industry. While the suitability of GPUs for throughput oriented applications is well-accepted, their applicability for real-time applications remains an open issue. Moreover, in mobile/embedded systems, energy-efficient computing is a major concern and yet, there has been no systematic study on the energy savings that GPUs may potentially provide. In this paper, we propose an approach to utilize both the GPU and the CPU in a heterogeneous fashion to meet the deadlines of a real-time application while ensuring that we maximize the energy savings. We note that GPUs are inherently built to maximize the throughput and this poses a major challenge when deadlines must be satisfied. The problem becomes more acute when we consider the fact that GPUs are more energy efficient than CPUs and thus, a naive approach that is based on maximizing GPU utilization might easily lead to infeasible solutions from a deadline perspective.

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