Monday, February 21, 2011

In the small world of the GPU, there a. .. Living

In ARM SoC, few companies are able to design their own GPU. Currently, only NVIDIA actually does, with Qualcomm's GPU but it is coming from the acquisition of the mobile division of ATi, a few years ago. Among other manufacturers, the GPU used is sourced from specialized firms such as ARM (and Mali), Imagination (the PowerVR) and ...

Alive. This company offers little known fact GPU licensed over 40 companies and big names like Marvell (in the Armada) and Freescale (in the future i. MX 6) use chips from the company. The company provides chips and chip compatible 2D OpenVG (for vector graphics) but also, we are interested in 3D chips.

Complete, the chips support OpenGL ES 2.0 but also, more rarely, OpenCL EP 1.1. Flash support is part of the chip and GC series can be used together to increase computing power, like the PowerVR SGX MPx. The most powerful version, GC4000, calculates 200 million triangles / s and a 2.5-gigapixel fillrate / s for an announced power of 48 gigaflops.

This chip is the model octocore society. In Marvell Armada is a GC8xx that is integrated, a version with a single core but with higher frequencies. Computing power is close to existing PowerVR: 35 million triangles / s, 6 gigaflops and fillrate (fairly poor) to 325 megapixels / s. In practice, it remains only three major players in the world of GPUs (and one of the three do not play in performance), the world of SoC GPU is much more interesting, especially with ATI (via Freescale and Qualcomm), ARM, Vivante, Imagination, etc..

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