[Lazy8s]

DMP, Digital Media Professionals, a Japanese GPU design company, announced their PICA brand of graphics processors, scalable for embedded devices from portables all of the way up to high-performance arcade systems. Their product, the PICA200, is a set of modular IP graphics cores for integration into SoCs.

The PICA200 scales with up to four pipelines and processes from up to four programmable vertex units. The 3D core, using their proprietary graphics technology named MAESTRO-2G, the second generation of the Maestro design, implements custom graphics algorithms as hardware for enabling a set of shading features that include per-vertex sub-surface scattering, bidirectional reflectance distribution function, cook-torrance, polygon subdivision, and soft shadowing. Their image post-processing module, the PICA-FBM frame buffer management, can polish the image with anti-aliasing and a set of other 2D functions and can actually be licensed independently as a core for 2D-only devices. In either case, the PICA-FBM can be extended with a PICA-VG vector graphics module.

The DMP company is another small graphics firm, staffed by 29, which started as a university research project and turned into a business a few years ago through funding initiatives. Shinichi Okamoto, former Sony executive who headed up development of the PlayStation2, sits on the board of directors.

Futuremark highlighted the capabilities of the PICA200 with a custom OpenGL ES demo entitled Mikage, with familiar visual themes from other of their benchmarking and custom demos for portables. Technology demonstrations from DMP's first-generation-MAESTRO, proof-of-concept processor, the ULTRAY2000, are also provided.

http://www.dmprof.com/d/en/en_technologydemo.html

[Freak'n Big Panda]

Soo how does this stack up when compared to competitors offerings (i.e mbx)? The tech demos look really nice for a GPU designed to be integrated into a SoC. Hopefully we'll see this chip in some phones within the next couple months/years.

[MfA]

Lots of fixed function trickery ... probably usefull for the embedded space, probably not usefull for arcade space and completely useless for the desktop.

[Xmas]

Originally Posted by Freak'n Big Panda

Soo how does this stack up when compared to competitors offerings (i.e mbx)? The tech demos look really nice for a GPU designed to be integrated into a SoC. Hopefully we'll see this chip in some phones within the next couple months/years.

Considering they don't mention any licensees and there's no SoC company on their partners page, "months" is almost certainly out of question.
Given the timeframe, competing solutions are PowerVR SGX, ATI/Bitboys G40, ARM/Falanx Mali 200, and the yet unannounced OpenGL ES 2.0 solutions from ATI and NVidia. There's not enough public knowledge on any of these cores to make a meaningful comparison.

The descriptions are rather vague. They do mention high level shaders on their Services and Jobs page, which makes me believe this isn't all fixed function. Everything they mention can be done on a chip with full shader support. However, I'd say if they don't support OpenGL ES 2.0, they stand no chance.


I'm rather surprised to see rip-mapping mentioned in the Ultra Y2000 feature list.

[Megadrive1988]

most likely, beyond the MBX family, but not nearly as good as the SGX family -- but that's purely an uneducated guess on my part.

[Lazy8s]

A presentation, Samurai Enlightened, was held at SIGGRAPH 2006 providing an overview of Mikage's composition and some of its custom PICA200 OpenGL ES 1.1 extensions.

http://www.khronos.org/developers/li...os_Tech_Talks/