PowerVR Rogue Architecture

[Grall]

You can still play it today either with a glide wrapper of a powervr wrapper

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not that desperate.

 

[Simon F]

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not that desperate.

....but multi-player combat mode in Ultimate race was great fun.

 

[Ailuros]

So Series8 is slated for 2016; it's November 2015 already, when will we see more details for S8? On the 31.12.2016?

 

[Arun]

What kind of detail do you want? It's a GPU architecture, it renders pixels, it's pretty fast
(<-- this is why I don't work in marketing)

 

[willardjuice]

How about what equivalent D3D feature level is it?

 

[Arun]

DX6 (if we don't include S3TC )

 

[Ailuros]

How about what equivalent D3D feature level is it?

https://imagination-technologies-cl...mmit-2015/Graphics-FromWearablesToServers.pdf

Page 9 gives you at least one hint. I'd still figure that anything above DX10.0 will be optional. No idea though if it'll reach DX12 and which "tier"

What kind of detail do you want? It's a GPU architecture, it renders pixels, it's pretty fast
(<-- this is why I don't work in marketing)

Marke-tiers aren't any more "generous" with stuff like that either

 

[tangey]

I know at one time IMG did say that they would switch to a cadence that would result in a new series per year. Perhaps they thought the changes that they considered important to be implemented for the year ahead, did not justify an increase in major series number.

Anyhow, I can't wait for series7XT PLUS S

I note this family brings full OpenCL 2.0 support. IMG has had GPGPU capabilities since the first series 5 (albeit only support for an embedded variant of OpenCL at that time). Speaking as a layman, who doesn't have great knowledge of these things, I suspect that the vast majority of 5 series SOCs out there have run zero GPGPU processes, and with the exception of Apple, the same might be said for series6 (one assumes apple is doing some GPGPU compute). If it has been largely redundant, then was it a poor design decision to require GPGPU compliance so early on, with what one assumes is a die area penalty.

 

[sebbbi]

To be fair, all architectures in the market with unified ALUs have supported compute capabilities (AMD R600, nVidia G80, all things Vivante, ARM Midgard, etc.). Turns out that if you have an ALU that can perform both pixel and vertex shaders, it must be versatile enough to be used for other compute workloads. My guess is all you need to do from there is being able to send the ALU results to some place where the CPU can read them

You need thread group synchronization (barriers), atomics and groupshared (on die) memory for GPU compute. PS and VS doesn't need these features. Xbox 360 had unified shaders (and UMA), but none of the above mentioned features, thus it could not run complex GPU compute tasks.

OpenCL 2.0 requires some other highly advanced GPU compute features, such as GPU side kernel enqueue (dynamic parallelism). This is a relatively new GPU feature, first available in CUDA 5.0. DirectX 12 still lacks this feature completely, even though Kepler, Maxwell, GCN, Broadwell and Skylake GPUs all support it. I am happy to see PowerVR Series 7 supporting it as well.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Xbox 360 had unified shaders (and UMA), but none of the above mentioned features, thus it could not run complex GPU compute tasks.

It could not run complex GPU compute tasks, but it could run compute tasks and I could swear I read about at least one game that used GPGPU in Xenos for some kind of real-time simulation.

Regardless, my point was just that supporting OpenCL mustn't be as expensive (transistor and power-wise) as tangey suggested.

 

[Rys]

I split off some of the 7XT Plus stuff into the Series 7 thread, and the GX5300 stuff into the GX5300 thread, to keep them on-topic.

 

[Ailuros]

Another bit of Rys' tiled work http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/the-dr-in-tbdr-deferred-rendering-in-rogue

That’s why, at least for our architecture, the tile size tends to be small; there’s more that John and his team consider when they’re figuring out the optimum size, of course, but those are the biggest factors. We’re currently at 32×32 pixels for regular rendering on Rogue, but it’s been smaller in the past on SGX, and also non-square for that architecture too.

Who's John?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Another bit of Rys' tiled work http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/the-dr-in-tbdr-deferred-rendering-in-rogue

From first paragraph:

It’s a novel architecture which works unlike any other, and we call it a tile-based deferred renderer, or TBDR.

Eeerm Rys.. I don't know when you're supposed to stop calling it novel, but I'm pretty sure 20 years-old is way past that definition

 

[Rys]

Eeerm Rys.. I don't know when you're supposed to stop calling it novel, but I'm pretty sure 20 years-old is way past that definition

I like to pretend it was all invented last week, to keep the magic alive.

 

[Rys]

Who's John?

He's that weird JohnH guy that shows up around here from time to time! Did you know that he smells of elderberries?

 

[cjo]

He's that weird JohnH guy that shows up around here from time to time! Did you know that he smells of elderberries?

And is very much mistaken about the proper condiments to use on a bacon sandwich.

 

[Ailuros]

He's that weird JohnH guy that shows up around here from time to time! Did you know that he smells of elderberries?

I knew who you meant; however does the average reader understand what the exact function of the gentleman you refer to is within the company?

 

[Ailuros]

From first paragraph:
Eeerm Rys.. I don't know when you're supposed to stop calling it novel, but I'm pretty sure 20 years-old is way past that definition

Just remove the word "architecture" from that sentence and you're good to go..... *snicker*

 

[Rys]

I knew who you meant; however does the average reader understand what the exact function of the gentleman you refer to is within the company?

Oh, yes. John is Vice President of Numerical Unit Usage, PowerVR.

 

[Ailuros]

PowerVR Series8XE:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10077/imagination-announces-powervr-series8xe-family
https://imgtec.com/news/press-relea...nce-power-and-area-in-cost-sensitive-markets/

.....unless I've lost track with the +50%, +100% stuff for each generation a GE8300 should end up somewhere in the GC6200 region, since the G1110 (S6XE) reaches 5.0 fps in Manhattan 3.0 offscreen.

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/powe...ng-efficiency-reducing-costs-ultra-affordable
http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/powe...automotive-and-consumer-electronics-oems-care

Now bring on 8XT