Guess what this is....

There's been a few close guesses so I should give it away :smile: It's the mask for a chip called PMX590, which was Series 5-esque, but not unified like SGX Competition would have been NV40 and R360 (and it wouldn't have done that well, especially against NV40). Can't really say much more than that, but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.
R360 and NV40 weren't competitors either. R420 was released in the same quarter as NV40 according to Beyond3D's own table.
 
OpenGL guy said:
R360 and NV40 weren't competitors either. R420 was released in the same quarter as NV40 according to Beyond3D's own table.
They were at the time of NV40's release, obviously. That should hint at when 590 should have shown up.
 
They were at the time of NV40's release, obviously. That should hint at when 590 should have shown up.
First NV40 cards were launched April 14, 2004. First r420 cards were launched May 4 2004.
So by that token the 590 would have launched late April 2004 :).
Though really R360 wasn't much of a competition for NV40 (unsurprisingly), and I don't think they were really comparable in price neither when the NV40 appeared, so you should have figured out which one you want to target :).
I can't figure out the die size from the mask pic though (and what's the structure size) so no idea if competing with either of these chips was realistic :)
 
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There's been a few close guesses so I should give it away :smile: It's the mask for a chip called PMX590, which was Series 5-esque, but not unified like SGX Competition would have been NV40 and R360 (and it wouldn't have done that well, especially against NV40). Can't really say much more than that, but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.
Sigh....Can you find the VGP?
 
I wouldn't really know GPU dies and such if I saw them, but for whatever reason this strikes me as a 'mobile' component. I recall ASUS debuting some kind of mobile GPU at one stage and it looked just like this...

No clue what it actually is though.
 
Were any of the graphics demos that were knocked up for this SEGA-destined hardware converted for SGX?

What kind of differences in efficiency did IMG see when moving from this older Series5 architecture to SGX?

The earliest mentions of Series5, like 2003 and earlier, seemed to a describe a different architecture that predates even the SEGA hardware -- something like a configurable pipeline with a set of features that could be switched in and out (which obviously says very little)... I can't find the old quote anymore...
 
It's (fairly obviously) something from Imagination, but it's not something currently on the market, or nearly so in the case of Rogue. I'd get shot for showing the masks for those online :LOL: It's something a bit more obscure, circa 2005....

PMX590 :LOL:

***edit: blah I should have seen the damn thread earlier and I would have won that one. I replied above while reading through the first page only... :(

(and it wouldn't have done that well, especially against NV40). Can't really say much more than that, but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.
What do you expect if they tell you that you can have only one single shot overall? You can either bet for a mission impossible or try to punch your way through with manual work which leads nowhere like it actually did. SEGA had a licence agreement for it for arcade machines (?) but I figure it was silently cancelled.

My recollection of it is that it was a single quad SM3+ concept (capable of processing two quads under conditionals), a PPP and a 128bit bus.
 
T but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.

It's been 10 days...

After much praying to the Gaming Gods they have spoken and have provided a solution

1. knock on bosses door
2. say "Oi knobcheese, er, I mean boss I want to tell b3d readers about the PMX590, the Gaming Gods have been informed and have decreed it shall come to pass"
3. boss replies "Hail the wisdom of the Gaming Gods, go forth young padawn and fulfill your destiny"
4. post
5. there is no 5
6. profit!!!
 
I've been too busy to do anything about it yet (hiring more B3Ders at Imagination mostly!), but I'll try and do so soon.
 
Bitboys Glaze3D

Though this has been cleared, I have to comment...
The one for AXE was huge and consisted four parts, IIRC. Of course Glaze did gained quite lot more than just the hunting ghost of Thor during respin to AXE. Yet the EDRAM blocks should be easily spottable as series of same looking areas. 8MB of eDRAM was quite lot in 0.22µm technology and so it should cover cleary big part of the mask.

I also spotted that someone here claimed to own only outside company AXE rev-B chip, but that's obiously plain wrong. Even though they are rare, about dozen or so existed outside the company when I got mine 6 years ago. I don't know how many of them have escaped since the company ended up as part of Qualcom. Yet the inventors of mentioned technology are not anymore working there and they might have something other venturies going on.

Rys: hopefully you got my PM. ;)
 
I have one for you guys. ;)

viewerkd.png
 
I remember once being in the unusual situation of having a fair bit of money and I had the idea of buying the ultimate gfx card and back then who was the name synonymous with high end graphics SGI. So I telephoned them and tried to buy a graphics card - and they didn't bloody make any. The swines :(
 
I remember once being in the unusual situation of having a fair bit of money and I had the idea of buying the ultimate gfx card and back then who was the name synonymous with high end graphics SGI. So I telephoned them and tried to buy a graphics card - and they didn't bloody make any. The swines :(

You truly are a legend!
 
SGI "graphics cards" back in the day were roughly the size of full-AT motherboard PCBs, and typically it took 2+ at least to complete the graphics pipeline; a geometry board and a rasterizer board...

Raw specs were pitiful compared to single-chip GPUs from the mid-aughts onwards in most respects other than framebuffer and texture RAM, but perhaps SGIs multi-chip approach had more "grunt", and could come closer to its theoretical max. Who knows.
 
Can't really say much more than that, but I'll try and get permission from the powers that be to talk about it a bit more, since it's a cloaked bit of PowerVR history.

Well your last excuse was interviewing b3d members for a job(took 10 days)
whats you excuse now :D
 
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