PowerVR Series 6 now official

62M 3DS in 2.5 years vs ~155M DS in 5 years, looks about the same... (Numbers from Wikipedia)
I doubt mobiles are directly competing, they seem to be addressing another market instead.

Anyway I'm not sure upgrading the Vita hardware would help, it seems that there's little market for an expensive handheld with HD resolution.

But back on track, it's a PowerVR Series 6 thread ^^
 
If Nintendo would be interested in a hw update for its handheld anytime soon then yes there the possibility of a Rogue would be more than interesting. Not likely though considering for how low BOMs Nintendo is typically aiming.
 
Series 6 rocks!

Is this sufficiently on-topic? :p

It might be on topic, but it creates too many negative sentiments amongst some of the readers here. You may other give us details or we'll give you a special B3D tar and feathers lynching treat :devilish:
 
I've waited a long time for people to sink their teeth into this official blurb:
Imagination will work closely with TSMC to develop highly optimised reference design flows and silicon implementations using Imagination’s PowerVR series-6 GPUs (in addition to previous-gen offerings as well as MIPS microprocessors) combined with TSMC’s advanced process technologies, including 16nm FinFET process technology. Imagination and TSMC R&D teams will also work together to create fully characterised reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC’s 3D IC technology capability to demonstrate new levels of system performance and capabilities while retaining all the essential characteristics of power, silicon area and small package footprint demanded by high volume mobile system-on-chips (SoCs).
Which appeared quite unprovoked at the end of March this year.

To me, this has Apple written all over it. But aside from that, it makes for some interesting fodder for speculation as to what such implementations might be capable of. The extrapolation isn't that far out, a year and a half or so, and the specific references to "high bandwidth" and "3D IC technology" are notable.
 
I figure they're doing it for the benefit of any of their licensees to have reference workflows like that.

As the company grows, they continue to reach further into the product development process and offer tools, services (ImgWorks), and "turnkey" solutions to allow their licensees faster time-to-market and more optimized reference designs (based upon what they learned from the implementations of the previous generation).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I figure they're doing it for the benefit of any of their licensees to have reference workflows like that.

As the company grows, they continue to reach further into the product development process and offer tools, services (ImgWorks), and "turnkey" solutions to allow their licensees faster time-to-market and more optimized reference designs (based upon what they learned from the implementations of the previous generation).

Of course.
Personally, I don't see Rogue as an architecture primarily targeted at current process nodes, given the life-time of an ImgTec generation, I would assume Series 6 to start to come into its' own so to speak roughly at the 20/16nm node at TSMC, and really hit its stride at 10nm. Marketing will decide what will be called Series 7, obviously. :)

What I find interesting in the announcement above is that it promises decent density increases from what we have at 28nm, FinFET helping out on the power draw side, and the bandwidth problem potentially having more elegant and performant solutions than today. There would seem to be the potential for a substantial step up in capabilities, if the necessary die area is spent.
 
Of course.
Personally, I don't see Rogue as an architecture primarily targeted at current process nodes, given the life-time of an ImgTec generation, I would assume Series 6 to start to come into its' own so to speak roughly at the 20/16nm node at TSMC, and really hit its stride at 10nm. Marketing will decide what will be called Series 7, obviously. :)

What I find interesting in the announcement above is that it promises decent density increases from what we have at 28nm, FinFET helping out on the power draw side, and the bandwidth problem potentially having more elegant and performant solutions than today. There would seem to be the potential for a substantial step up in capabilities, if the necessary die area is spent.

The talk of 3D IC is interesting. With the next-gen of mobile GPUs increasing their computation power, much faster than memory bandwidth is scaling in mobile SoCs, LPDDR4 won't be here for a while, and how much faster will it ultimately be than LPDDR3, I can see bandwidth being a real issue, especially if 4K panels (please no) become the next big thing for tablets.

If Apple surely moves to LPDDR3 in the A7X, I wonder if they will keep the quad memory controller config, that would give Rogue some decent headroom compared to say a Qualcomm S800 SoC.
 
it will be interesting to compare Apple A7X to Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 ..

BTW, Does Imagination Technology trying to compete with ARM .. in Purchasing & integrating MIPS architecture to its GPU chipset ?!
 
Imagination would love to sell MIPS as the CPU for mobile phones, if that's what you meant, though they have some large markets already well alligned to MIPS even without it.

Imagination may offer incentives for licensees to purchase a license for both sets of IPs, if that's what you meant.

If you meant whether MIPS is used as a microcontroller within a PowerVR core, nope. At some point, Imagination might brand it that way for the logic within the GPUs scheduler or some other part of the graphics subsystem (kind of like how they were promoting that certain video cores, I believe, used Meta technology to drive part of the subsystem).
 
[Charlie.D's hat on] : Imagination is building the SoC of the upcoming Amazon console :woot: [/Charlie.D's hat off]
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Imagination would love to sell MIPS as the CPU for mobile phones, if that's what you meant, though they have some large markets already well alligned to MIPS even without it.

Imagination may offer incentives for licensees to purchase a license for both sets of IPs, if that's what you meant.

yeh, that what I was referring to .. MIPS is popular architecture but ARM has the edge when it comes to Mobile ..

but might they offer Qualcomm-like business integrate ( Krait + Adreno ) i.e ( IMPS + PowerVR) ?! :D

[Charlie.D's hat on} : Imagination is building the SoC of the upcoming Amazon console :woot: [/Charlie.D's hat off]

nice info bro .. :p
 
Last edited by a moderator:
An eight cluster Rogue core still hasn't been announced. I'd imagine an MP configuration should be at least a G6630MP2 or perhaps a G6830MP2, which would be quite a bit of horsepower.

On the topic of IMG IP being bundled together, like MIPS and PowerVR, that seems to be one of the characteristics of Ineda's solution for SoCs targeting the wearable computing market like smart watches and health products. They call the SoCs WPUs, wearable processor units, and should make good use out of the smaller variants within ImgTec's MIPS and PowerVR portfolios (probably both graphics and video at the very least) like a G6100.

http://imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=795
 
When Imagination says they're bringing ray tracing to real-time content (and not just content creation tools for professionals) and deploying it into their mobile, PowerVR rasterization road map no less, they aren't just projecting out to some hopeful indefinite timeframe; they apparently have already worked out real, substantial implementation details.

https://sites.google.com/site/raytracingcourse/Low Power Raytracing.pdf?attredirects=1

"Ray tracing is the future and always will be" (funny title) was one of Imagination's presentations at this year's SIGGRAPH, by James McCombe from the Caustic team.

I had wanted to download the presentation after seeing it mentioned on the events schedule at the ImgTec website, and thanks to Ailuros, who pointed me to it, I've gotten a little glimpse of what's to come in mobile graphics architectures.
 
When Imagination says they're bringing ray tracing to real-time content (and not just content creation tools for professionals) and deploying it into their mobile, PowerVR rasterization road map no less, they aren't just projecting out to some hopeful indefinite timeframe; they apparently have already worked out real, substantial implementation details.

https://sites.google.com/site/raytracingcourse/Low Power Raytracing.pdf?attredirects=1

"Ray tracing is the future and always will be" (funny title) was one of Imagination's presentations at this year's SIGGRAPH, by James McCombe from the Caustic team.

I had wanted to download the presentation after seeing it mentioned on the events schedule at the ImgTec website, and thanks to Ailuros, who pointed me to it, I've gotten a little glimpse of what's to come in mobile graphics architectures.
Just to be clear "Ray tracing is the future and always will be" was the title of the course not just McCombe's presentation.
 
Back
Top