Samsungs new Soc, but who's supplying the Graphics ?

•Floating-point pipeline & Object-order rendering
•4-Way SIMD vertex shader+ pixel shader
•ShaderModel 3.0: World 1st implementation
•128-bit (32-bit x 4) FP x 1 Vertex Shader
128-bit (32-bit x 4) FP x 1 Pixel Shaders
8-stage pipeline
512 Instruction Slots (configurable)
•Memory BW Optimization by Hierarchical Caching

Doesn't look like SGX at all to me, since it's SIMD and not unified. Can't be ATI's either and NVIDIA doesn't license theirs... So I'm thinking ARM/Falanx's Mali, yeah... Congrats to the guys working there if that's true. And if it's not, I am incredibly curious who might be behind that IP then.

 

Could well be: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS76869+07-Jan-2008+PRN20080107

 

Was that 8M in $ or £?

Either way it seems too high - IMG will be sharing the royalties with ARM, as the MBX license was signed with Samsung under the joint agreement IMG had with ARM at the time.

Also the IP is for the MBX Lite, so will be at the lower end of the royalty scale.

Finally IMG have previously said that royalty levels decrease with volume, so all round I would have thought IMG are getting around 10p to 20p royalty per chip.

With Apple indicating expected sales around 10M for the first year, I would expect royalties of around £1.5m to IMG. Not massive, nor insignificant, but with the projected volumes for subsequent years, including additional models, the loss of this to ARM would be very disappointing.

Rob.

 

Ah, of course - sorry!

I did wonder, given the similarity in viewpoints

I also see the current iPhone as the first in a series, and believe it and subsequent variations will sell in massive quantities, so I totally agree regarding the desirability of the S3C6410 not being chosen.

Rob.

 

I would guess it has to be mali, cuz if it were to be an SGX it would have a unified shader architecture.

 

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE:IMG; "Imagination") - a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property ("SoC IP") - reports that it has signed a licence agreement with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (“Samsung”) with respect to certain POWERVR SGX graphics and VXD video IP cores.
This licence enables Samsung to manufacture semiconductor devices which integrate these IP cores from Imagination.
Under the terms of its licensing arrangements, Imagination receives licence fees and royalty revenues on SoCs incorporating Imagination’s IP.

 

Alternatively, maybe Samsung synthetized VXD for Apple, then realized 'holy shit this is a bazillion times better than our technology ' and then they ran to PowerVR to license it and got SGX at the same time...

 

Samsung licensed the right to only manufacture those PowerVR IPs, not to implement them into their own designs, from the wording of the PR.

As the others were saying, Samsung seems to be facilitating their ability to compete for the manufacturing of a next generation iPhone SoC.

 

Hmm, yeah, now that I read the wording again you're right. So the big question is: would they need to do this 1+ year ahead of production so they can start on the synthesis work or tape-out? Or could this confirm the iPhone 3G uses VXD? Because if that's true...

 

http://www.appleinsider.com/article...le_advanced_gaming_graphics_into_iphones.html

Extensive coverage now on Appleinsider thats to "T" for sorting them out!

All this looks most likely for the 2009 version, the current version most probably will be based on the same hardware given the timing coincides closely to the official SDK release.

 

Yeah: all indications from Imgtec are that Intel's System Controller Hub and Texas Instruments' OMAP3 will be the first implementations of SGX.

 

I thought I'd bump this thread because I *very briefly* talked to someone at Samsung during Mobile World Congress, and from what I could understand (his accent was even worse than mine!) their OpenGL ES 2.0 3D core is actually in-house (!!!)

This kinda makes sense given the specs, since I don't think Mali does "Object-order rendering" or "Memory BW Optimization by Hierarchical Caching". Amusingly, they are also the most open about performance in the latest version of their datasheet - yay?

It looks decent, until you look at the last line. 37.8M is less than 1/3rd the peak throughput; what's going on here?! I guess that's not too bad for blending, but what scares me is that 'shaded' fillrate does not include the word 'bilinear'. I certainly hope it's full-speed for bilinear! *sigh*

I suspect that they use a highly customized version of ARM's Mali SW for their drivers; it is interesting to see that ARM's website always seems to imply that this SW is optimized for Mali, but not necessarily exclude for it (even excluding the fact some of it also works on ARM CPUs). It seems pretty damn crazy to want to do your own 3D core nowadays, but then again Samsung is also making their own LTE and WiMax single-mode chips sooo... (that makes sense in terms of building IP/patents to reduce license/royalty fees in a way that making a 3D core doesn't though)

At their MWC stand, Samsung was demoing a pretty large number of things (including mobile TV) but wasn't being very specific about any of them. They had a demo of their next app processor which supports 720p video playback, and they had a roadmap diagram that showed they would support 1080p in 2010. So I guess they're still want to be a serious competitor in that market.

EDIT: Only alternative I can think of is that it's a GPU from Vivante, but I don't think they really fit the bill... So I would still tend to think it's in-house, although if anyone has any other info I'd obviously be very interested.

 

Can't be SGX given that Samsung only took a "direct" licence late last year long after this SoC became available...

 

An old roadmap from Samsung of their mobile 3D plans implied that, after their MBX Lite-equipped SoCs, they'd use different IP for an incremental upgrade (which they rated at a performance of 10M tri/sec, if I remember correctly.)

In-house sourcing of graphics hardware IP isn't unheard of in this space. Another major semi, Toshiba, has been doing it all along, too. Their ES 1.1 co-processors were followed up with an announcement of a "100M tri/sec" ES 2.0 accelerator, speculated to be the salvaged fruits of the R&D that went into the failed contender for the PS3's GPU, the RS.

 

That old Samsung roadmap specified a 3D part rated at 5M tri/sec, actually, and scheduled for availability around 2006, if I recall, to follow up their 1M tri/sec MBX Lite part, now that I'm thinking back again.

Even at that time, Samsung appeared to be designing with multiple 3D hardware IPs.