I am wondering if the GPU (video core) part can be used for numerical analysis? Like the Nvidia GPU's are now used for machine learning?
The way I think of it is:
I am on bare metal, and I've got a small single purpose OS that's driving a car around using PWM DC motor control, and collecting data from IR and LiDAR sensors using I2C.
I want to do some numerical calculation on this data on the GPU while the CPU is being used for I2C and PWM, so I can feedback loop the results back to the CPU for more driving instructions.
Any thoughts on the viability of this? Can the video core be used in this way?
On the Pi 3 there's multi core, so with clever programming, I can off load the analysis to one or more cores. But the Zero is single core. If I am on zero and in bare metal, the video core is not being used. Can I utilize it for this?
Also, assuming I am on Pi 3, would the video core be faster at this numerical calculation than one CPU core?