Investigated whether the RV1106 NPU (RKNPU) could do 3D rendering or other
graphical work as we port its driver to 6.18. Verdict: no. Read the vendored
rknpu driver directly — it executes a pre-compiled regcmd list from Rockchip's
closed RKNN compiler; no register ISA, no arbitrary-kernel submit path. Only the
vertex-transform stage (GEMM) maps at all, and rasterization/depth/texture/
shading/framebuffer have no mapping to a conv/pool op set — absent, not slow. For
every CNN-shaped graphical candidate the SoC already has a better fit (RGA 2D,
idle RKIVE classic-CV), and there's no camera. Recommend porting rknpu.ko only
for future non-visual inference, never for graphics.
Caveat flagged in the doc: the no-rasterizer claim is from the RKNN op taxonomy +
architecture, not register-level ground truth (TRM Part 2 is unpublished).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017wB8KB3MMQztRDXCMCkPrf
