PowerVR SGX543

iThingy, surely.

 

...and the joke fits here because if you add up all so far rumours it's hard to define it as a MID, netbook or anything else. It more sounds at this stage like a bit of everything than anything else.

Apple isn't by far alone in the smartphone market and while OMAP3 based phones will soon appear in larger quantities from many manufacturers, I severely doubt that Apple will stick with its 2nd generation iPhone to the same MBXLite core as today. As for power consumption I wouldn't worry too much if a hypothetical SGX53x is on anything <65nm.

 

A 800x480 or 960x640 display (3.5"-4") in 2010

 

Do you realize that SGX535/540/545 and 543 have the same amount of TMUs? Assuming the same frequency for all which of them has the higher raw fillrate and what else would you need for a higher resolution exactly?

 

Too many, declining markets at power consumption levels higher than mobile exist for which to spend the resources designing custom SGX cores, so offering an efficient way to multi-core with the highest-end mobile part is a good way to cover all of those other potential target markets.

 

Kristof Beets (IMG business Dev manager) presentation at Eurographics 2009 in relation to scalable graphics:-

http://people.csail.mit.edu/kapu/EG_09_MGW/IMG_MP_GPGPU.pdf

Couple of bulletin points caught my eye:-


Mobile Multicore solutions will be here within a year

GP-GPU already in R&D using SGX with all major OEMs e.g. Image Processing

 

Nice find. Slide5 is quite interesting also.

 

I'm not exactly sure what slide 5 is actually saying. Is it suggesting that as performance rises the relative overhead of a multi-pipe solution becomes greater than that of a multi-core solution. Or is it merely saying that at a certain performance level the overhead involved in the two systems becomes similar ?

 

If interpreted correctly, it's as honest as it can be.

 

How does that compare with what's out in the netbook market?

It seems people are willing to take a couple of steps down in performance from the cheapest laptops for the price and form factor of a netbook.

At the recent earnings press conference, the acting CEO of Apple derided the small keyboards and poor performance of netbooks as not meeting Mac OS X experience benchmarks.

I don't think people expect to edit video. Certainly view video and maybe record video chats (and maybe having the power to do multi-party video chats in iChat), scroll around iPhoto and iTunes, etc.

 

Looking at the most popular or best-selling games (the ones you actually have to pay for) in the App. Store, it doesn't look like there's that much interest in 3D games.

Or that people are willing to pay more than a couple of dollars for a casual, simple game.

Graphics don't seem to be the driver here.

Of course there were rumors about Apple setting off a "pro" games store with content mostly from bigger publishers, not the one-man shops. Presumably, the pricing would be more along the lines of the DS or PSP games.

These games would presumably have more production values, require much more storage, have more polished graphics, etc.

But that never materialized.

 

Not yet. I think we'll see some sort of "Pro" store till the end of the year. Most likely with the (high-end) iPhoneQ409.

 

Considering it's quite some time ago those posts were made, I guess it's never too late is it?

Why are you asking me? Ask Apple's employees why they're repeatedly stating that it isn't possible at the moment to build a netbook that isn't crap. I just replied to that and no I can't know what's in the back of their mind.

In any case proposed solutions will not necessarily make their implementation impractical or raise the cost too high in the foreseeable future with =/<45nm manufacturing processes.

 

IMG in Nov '09 confirmed they had 3 (undisclosed) licencees for 543MP.
http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/newsdetail.asp?NewsID=497


Today they have announced that Renesas has licenced a multi-core 543 for multi-use.
http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/newsdetail.asp?NewsID=546


I'm assuming Apple, Intel and Sony are the 3 previous 543MP licencees.


Of interest is that the Renesas licence is for the mobile market, which again is the first confirmation of 543MP being used in that area.

This *may* tie into a couple of other recent announcements.

First MIPS announced a colaboration with IMG
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224600327

The following day MIPS in their quarterly statement announced they had signed their first major mobile phone baseband/application chip company in Asia.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle....10ENJ5QE1GHPCKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=224700217

"The unnamed customer based in Asia "has licenses for both ARM and MIPS," and it chose MIPS over ARM for its future 3G basebands/application processors"

I had assumed that it was likely to be Mediatek, who have an IMG licence (also a Mali one but if it is them, and moving from ARM, they are hardly going to use Mali), But it could be Renesas, given todays announcement. Of course Renesas are already an SGX licencee from previous.

 

What speaks against the possibility Renesas being one of those 3?

Anyway considering that Renesas (and NEC before the merger) in car SoCs have already quad-core CPUs, multi-core GPUs in future SoCs hardly comes as a surprise to me.

 

1) Because I'd be reasonably sure about Apple,Sony & intel.

2) Because given that they previously stated they had 3 MP licencees in Nov '09, I don't think you can then announced again. This was a formal financial market announcement, so London Stock Exchange rules have to be considered.


Note that I added to the previous post some other info, including that the licence is for the mobile space.

 

With Apple's broad, multiple cores, multi-use license to PowerVR parts, they seem likely to be among the 543MP licensees and likely to be deploying it into the mobile sector.

Intel might favor the DirectX focused cores over the embedded SGXs, so they might finally move on from the 535 to the 545 and choose functionality over the higher performance of a 543MP.

Although Sony with the next PSP design doesn't fit with some of the customer profiles mentioned in the MIPS/PowerVR collaboration, Sony would be a focus of that deal if they were indeed designing for CPU ISA compatibility in the next PSP.

Meanwhile, Renesas just switched to ARM from SuperH for mobiles and some other markets.

 

Ah, thanks for that, did not know this. This to me means that the MIPS announcement is most likely with Mediatek, which is who I originally thought it was with. Mediatek is an SGX licencee since Jul '09.

 

The other MP licence may well be TI for OMAP 5, if intel is the lead partner for 545 as intimated and perhaps headed for Medfield next year?

Obvious a redundant post now that TI is a new XT licensee

 

From what I've heard next generation embedded SoCs from Intel are supposed to deliver a LOT more performance than Moorestown. If I interpret "LOT" correctly a 543 MP fits that picture a "LOT" better