Gráfica Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU

[Dark Kaeser]

Celebrating 30 years of PowerVR: looking back - moving forward​

As the Queen will tell you, anniversaries give you a chance to step back and take stock, to see how far you have come and to celebrate your achievements, and today, we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of PowerVR, the graphics architecture that was first unveiled to the world way back in 1992 and is still making waves today.

Of course, we’re just into the third quarter of the year, and we will have another product launch to get excited about before the year is out.

https://blog.imaginationtech.com/ce...-30th-anniversary-looking-back-moving-forward

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Ainda não vi nenhum SoC com as C Series, mas pelos vistos no início do ano a Imagination lançou as D Series

Imagination’s IMG DXT GPU unlocks scalable, premium ray tracing for all mobile gamers​

The first in the D-Series family, IMG DXT offers mobile device manufacturers the chance to integrate ray tracing into their SoCs to match their design goals, from premium to mainstream devices.

With support for Fragment Shading Rate (FSR) for Vulkan®, IMG DXT frees up performance headroom for developers. FSR decreases the number of fragments processed and significantly increases graphics performance with minimal impact on visual quality. At the same time, FSR makes ray-traced effects more efficient as fewer rays are sent into the scene, meaning realistic lights and shadows are achieved within a smaller silicon area.

The flagship DXT-72-2304 configuration delivers the performance demanded by ultra-premium mobile devices, delivering 72 GTexels/s and 2.5 TFLOPs of FP32 arithmetic performance, with a 50% higher maximum single-core performance compared to the previous generation. DXT cores offer 20% better performance density per area than the IMG CXT GPUs, while significantly reducing power requirements.

Improved texture and compute performance

The IMG DXT GPU features a new shader processing unit (SPU) design. The SPU is a silicon block that contains both an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) for compute tasks and a texture processing unit (TPU) for shading pixels, geometry processing and rasterisation logic.

The DXT GPU delivers 50% more top-end compute and texture (ALU/TPU) performance per SPU, thanks to a new triple Universal Shader Cluster (USC) design (3x ALU/TPU units), where previous architectures focused only on a dual-USC design (2x ALU/TPU units). This improved building block enables the creation of Imagination’s highest-performance premium mobile GPU, the DXT-72-2304, which boasts 72 GTexels/s and 2.5 TFLOPs FP32 at a clock frequency of 1 GHz.

https://www.imaginationtech.com/new...le-premium-ray-tracing-for-all-mobile-gamers/

Imagination Technologies Reimagines GPUs With Ray Tracing​

High-level overview of the IMG DXT, including unified shading clusters (USCs), texture processing units (TPUs), raster/geometry blocks, and top-level components. ​

Now, with Imagination's ray acceleration cluster (RAC) technology in the new GPU, mobile phone manufacturers can integrate ray tracing into their system on chips (SoCs). Imagination claims its IMG DXT delivers high performance and power efficiency while being affordable with up to 40% lower area cost. Below are some of Imagination's technologies found in the IMG DXT GPU.

Fragment Shading Rate​

The new GPU can scale from an area-efficient half-RAC configuration to a quad-RAC design to cover various applications, from simple shadowing in hybrid implementations to premium array-traced graphics for high-end games.

Thanks to something called fragment shading rate (FSR), the new IMG DXT frees performance headroom for developers. FSR decreases the number of fragments processed and increases graphics performance with negligible impact on visual quality. The FSR technique trades image quality for improved performance and reduced power consumption. Rather than using one shade per pixel, the program allows a shade over a region of multiple pixels, lowering the bandwidth and energy requirement while delivering high performance.

Texture Processing Unit​

Beyond graphics improvement, the Imagination team found that many modern games spend significant time on post-processing algorithms for blur, depth, and additional effects. Most of these algorithms are bottlenecked by the throughput rate of the texture processing unit (TPU).

IMG DXT's TPU creates a so-called "fast path" for these post-processing effects. The TPU doubles the performance only when the hardware detects regular processing across a region. These regions reuse processing points with texture cache and 2D sampling of a single texture with no detail or perspective. It accelerates tasks such as post-processing effects in games and computational photography filter processing. It improves image quality with faster and more power-efficient noise-eliminating algorithms.

With all these new technologies, IMG DXT cores exhibit 20% better performance density per area than Imagination's last generation of GPUs, the IMG CXT, while reducing power consumption. The DXT-72-2304 configuration delivers 72 GTexels/s and 2.5 TFLOPs of FP32 arithmetic performance, with a 50% higher maximum single-core performance than the CXT GPUs.

Shader Processing Unit (SPU)​

IMG DXT features a new shader processing unit (SPU) design that consists of an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) for computational tasks and a texture processing unit (TPU) for shading pixels, geometry processing, and rasterization logic. With its new triple universal shader cluster (USC) design (3x ALU/TPU units), the GPU could deliver 50% more top-end compute and texture (ALU/TPU) performance per SPU.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/imagination-technologies-reimagines-gpus-with-ray-tracing/

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Imagination GPUs With PVR Vulkan + Zink Working Well For OpenGL 4.6​

Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink.

The Mesa PVR Vulkan driver continues to mature while with Imagination's DDK Rel 23.1 release they are now formally advertising Imagination GPUs with support for OpenGL 4.6 via Zink.

Imagination with their proprietary drivers haven't advanced past OpenGL 3.3 while now thanks to leveraging the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan compatibility layer are now ready to advertise OpenGL 4.6 support for their products.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PVR-Zink-Imagination-OpenGL-4.6


A ver pelos "merge request" para o MESA no gitlab estão bastante activos
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa...s?scope=all&state=merged&label_name[]=powervr

 

[Dark Kaeser]

Imagination PowerVR Open-Source GPU Driver To Be Introduced In Linux 6.8​

It's been well over a decade since many were wanting open-source Imagination PowerVR graphics when their graphics IP was more common among SoCs, but with the Linux 6.8 kernel in early 2024 there will finally be an upstream, open-source PowerVR DRM kernel graphics driver!

The development of this Imagination DRM driver has been initially focused on the AXE-1-16M GPU and testing with the TI SK-AM62 board. The kernel driver has also been tested with the BeaglePlay board.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Imagination-PVR-Linux-6.8-DRM

 

[ToTTenTranz]

O facto de estarem a tornar open source a driver stack principal para Linux não é, na realidade, um sinal de que a PowerVR está às portas da morte?

Tenho ideia que ninguém pega nas arquiteturas deles há anos, pelo menos há 2 arquiteturas atrás.
Ou a apple na realidade continua a usar e pagar pelo IP desenvolvido por eles, ou cheira-me que não vão conseguir existir por muito mais tempo...

 

[muddymind]

Eles continuam fortes no mercado industrial e de infotainment de carros. Fora disso efetivamente não estão a fazer muito mais.

 

[Dark Kaeser]

RISC-V

Mas sim acho que a maioria dos chips embedded, incluindo os TI Jacinto e Renesas (sector automóvel) usam ainda as série B, tal como os SoC's risc-v como os da StarFive e T-Head, mas tendo em conta a realidade chinesa, ou a falta de conhecimento da mesma, é bastante possível que haja uma série de SoC específicos para o sector embedded para alimentar o mercado interno que se desconheçam por cá.

A alternativa neste campo também não é muita: os Mali da ARM ou os Vivante da VeriSilicon.


Mas num tópico aqui ao pé «GPU made in China» a Innosilicon Fantasy tem uma linha de GPU licenciada (acho que a Fantasy 2 ainda é série B) e pelos vistos a MTT também.

Chinese MTT S80 PCIe 5.0 GPU Closes in on GTX 1650​

The specifications look very decent on paper, minus the high TDP. However, the driver is what's hindering MTT S80's performance. The MTT S80 reportedly leverages the Chunxiao silicon, based on the PowerVR architecture developed by Imagination Technologies. The exact generation of the PowerVR GPU remains a mystery.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-mtt-s80-pcie-50-gpu-closes-in-on-gtx-1650