PowerVR goes 4K with GT7900 for game consoles
PowerVR is announcing its new high-end GPU architecture today, in preparation for both Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference (MWC and GDC, respectively). Imagination Technologies has lost some ground to companies like Qualcomm in recent years, but its cores continue to power devices from Samsung, Intel, MediaTek, and of course, Apple. The new GT7900 is meant to crown the Series 7 product family with a GPU beefy enough for high-end products — including 4K support at 60fps — as well as what Imagination is classifying as “affordable” game consoles.
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First, some specifics: The Series 7 family is based on the Series 6 “Rogue” GPUs already shipping in a number of devices. But it includes support for hardware fixed-function tessellation (via the Tessellation Co-Processor), a stronger geometry front-end, and an improved Compute Data Master that PowerVR claims can schedule wavefronts much more quickly. OpenGL ES 3.1 + the Android Extension Pack is also supported. The new GT7900 is targeting a 14nm-and-16nm process, and can offer up to 800 GFLOPS in FP32 mode (what we’d typically call single-precision) and up to 1.6TFLOPS in FP16 mode.
One of the more interesting features of the Series 7 family is its support for what PowerVR calls PowerGearing. The PowerVR cores can shut down sections of the design in power-constrained scenarios, in order to ensure only areas of the die that need to be active are actually powered up. The end result should be a GPU that doesn’t throttle nearly as badly as competing solutions.
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On paper, the GT7900 is a beast, with 512 ALU cores and enough horsepower to even challenge the low-end integrated GPU market if the drivers were capable enough. Imagination Technologies has even created an HPC edition of the Series 7 family — its first modest foray into high-end GPU-powered supercomputing. We don’t know much about the chip’s render outputs (ROPs) or its memory support, but the older Series 6 chips had up to 12 ROPS. The GT7900 could sport 32, with presumed support for at least dual-channel LPDDR4.
Quad-channel memory configurations (if they exist) could actually give this chip enough klout to rightly call itself a competitor for last-generation consoles, if it was equipped in a set-top box with a significant thermal envelope. Imagination is also looking to push the boundaries of gaming in other ways — last year the company unveiled an architecture that would incorporate a ray tracing hardware block directly into a GPU core.
The problem with targeting the affordable console market is that every previous attempt to do this has died. From Ouya to Nvidia’s Shield, anyone who attempted to capitalize on the idea of a premium Android gaming market has either withered or been forced to drastically shift focus. Nvidia may have built two successive Shield devices, but the company chose to lead with automotive designs at CES 2015 — its powerful successor to the Tegra K1, the Tegra X1, has only been talked about as a vehicle processor. I suppose Nvidia could still announce a shield update around the X1. But considering the company didn’t even mention it at CES, where Tegra was launched as a premium mobile gaming part, speaks volumes about where Nvidia expects its revenue to come from in this space.
For its part, Imagination Technology anticipates the GT7900 to land in micro-servers, full-size notebooks, and game consoles. It’s an impressive potential resume, but we’ll see if the ecosystem exists to support such lofty goals. If I had to guess, I’d wager this first chip is the proof-of-concept that will demonstrate the company can compete outside its traditional smartphone and tablet markets. Future cores, possibly built with support for Samsung’s nascent Wide I/O standard, will be more likely to succeed.
