PowerVR Shows The Way at ARM DevCon 2004

yeah yeah, lowend stuff. ok its highend for embedded, but gawd, where is Series 5.... sigh

 

anyone who plays 3d games on gsm-like device is insane.
imho

 

In contrast to the previous posters, I think this is awesome!
Do these demo's already run on the Dell x50? or isn't there
a PDA out yet which runs them?

Either way, it's pretty cool that we will soon have PDA's which have Geforce 3+ level graphics.

Now there's even more reason to upgrade my lowly palm

 

This demos all use the optinal VGP. The Axim X50v don't have an VGP.

I am not sure if they can run without it, if it is a MBX or MBX lite should not be a problem.

AFAIK the videos are from an device with MBX (not Lite) + VGP, maybe an OMAP2 device?!

 

Look, I keep reading about this "Series 5" thing... is PowerVR now making BMWs?

 

anyone who takes their desktop PC into a bus, train, school class or meeting and uses it there is insane. As are the people who try to play with their laptop on classes or meetings without the teacher or boss noticing it.

 

I'm doing that right now. And he hasn't noticed. Go me.

 

i thought the VGP was supplied/[at least] helped massively by ARM Neon technology
Neon is in ARM11-and-up cores... right?
ARM9, 10 & 11 all support MBX, but only ARM11 has Neon, so only ARM11+MBX will have this functionality?

please correct me if i'm wrong

this MBX story gets more confusing by the day

 

Neon is an 64/128 bit instruction set for upcomming ARM CPUs. No ARM CPU support Neon at the moment and Neon and MBX are two differnt things.

ARM distinguish two MBX cores, the MBX HR-S (PowerVR know this as MBX) and the MBX R-S (PowerVR named it MBX Lite). I am not complete sure, but the VGP is only for the MBX HR-S or MBX.

 

Loewe!!! you know me. i know you. i work here:- http://www.pvrgenerations.co.uk/

i may not know much and may get a bit muddled sometimes but your above statement is not something i am likely to muddle

i thought i saw something official a few weeks back saying that Neon would be ideal for that kind of thing; pre-processing for MBX

i haven't looked at Neon, and probably wouldn't understand what it does and how it does it. i posted mainly to provoke a response as it seemed strange that these demos came out shortly after, and at an ARM event to boot

just read the PVR PR (must admit to not having done that up 'til now) and it does mention "MBX and its companion Vertex Geometry Processor..." and "PowerVR Vertex Geometry Processor (VGP) is a high-performance, fully programmable floating-point SIMD coprocessor..." so this VGP is actually a separate unit - so which ARM [or other] dev' platform refresh is this going to be included with?...

ah!...

i get it!...

is this VGP integrated into the MBX-Pro?

 

From the block diagram on the Videologic PowerVR website, it seems the VGP is integrated in the HR-S MBX core; it is part of the MBX silicon rather than a separate entity.

 

There are anumber of flavours of MBX, with MBX and MBX lite at least - it may even be the case that the standard MBX flavour doesn't necessarily mean that the VGP is part of the design (that may be "MBX with VGP"). Perhaps K or Simon might like to clear up the options a little.

I'll wager that the VGP was implemented in the new Renasas chip though.

 

MBX/MBX PRO can come with an optional VGP, as MBX Lite can come with an optional VGP Lite (AFAIK).

I've frankly no idea what the real differences between VGP and VGP Lite would be, yet if the latter is still a 4-way SIMD, then performance most likely depends on clockspeed (4 MFLOPs per MHz).

Speculation:

MBX Lite
MBX Lite + VGP Lite
MBX
MBX + VGP
MBX PRO
MBX PRO + VGP



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Even then, they should be done with it by now....

 

Both MBX and MBX-L** can have their own version of the VGP (i.e. there's a correspondingly lower cost version for the MBX-L') at the front end of the system if the customer wants it.

Given that I believe that most implementations of MBX[-L] have a VGP, I won't take your bet.



**Sorry, I personally can't stand "lite" in any product name

 

What do you guys make of this?

http://www.falanx.no/product.html
http://www.falanx.no/download/Mali Geometry Product Spec USL.pdf

They say it supports VS 2.0

 

hmm, curious, sounds like PowerVR all the way through, but doesn't say it...

 

Falanx is not a new company..I believe we already talked about them in a previous iteration of this site.
IIRC one of the guys involved in Falanx foundation he's still writing here..but I'm not sure about that.

ciao,
Marco

 

Interesting to see FalanX waking up also.

(it's one of the "hype" companies that only few ones believed really being up to something. They were originally developing desktop core, but because of several problems, it never saw a daylight officially. Only guys working in Norway know how far it really went before getting freezed as project. In any case, story is about the same as Bitboys, though not as well known as BB one.)

specs definately look good and based on that, it looks like a serious competitor in mobile space. Only time will show what's the situation in real world applications.

 

it's even got FLXTC!
can anyone find the patent for this?