Using RenderScript and RCUDA for Compute Intensive Tasks on Mobile Devices: a Case Study

The processing power of mobile devices is continuously increasing. In this paper we perform a case study in which we assess three different programming models that can be used to leverage this processing power for compute intensive tasks. We use an imaging algorithm and compare a reference implementation of this algorithm based on OpenCV with a multi threaded RenderScript implementation and an implementation based on computation offloading with Remote CUDA. Experiments show that on a modern Tegra 3 quad core device a multi threaded implementation can achieve a 2.2 speed up factor at the same energy cost, whereas computation offloading does neither lead to speed ups nor energy savings.