Imagination has announced new B-series GPU designs focused on automotive and high-performance computing use cases, as it has become difficult for the company to compete in the mobile GPU market:
It's almost been a year since Imagination had announced its brand-new A-series GPU IP, a release which at the time the company called its most important in 15 years. The new architecture indeed marked some significant updates to the company's GPU IP, promising major uplifts in performance and promises of great competitiveness. Since then, other than a slew of internal scandals, we've heard very little from the company – until today's announcement of the new next-generation of IP: the B-Series.
The new Imagination B-Series is an evolution of last year's A-Series GPU IP release, further iterating through microarchitectural improvements, but most importantly, scaling the architecture up to higher performance levels through a brand-new multi-GPU system, as well as the introduction of a new functional safety class of IP in the form of the BXS series.
[....] Imagination's current highest-end hardware implementation in the BXT series is the BXT 32-1024, and putting four of these together creates an MC4 GPU. In a high-performance implementation reaching up to 1.5GHz clock speeds, this configuration would offer up to 6TFLOPs of FP32 computing power. Whilst this isn't quite enough to catch up to Nvidia and AMD, it's a major leap for a third-party GPU IP provider that's been mostly active in the mobile space for the last 15 years.
[....] Beyond the addition of safety critical features on the BXS series, the automotive IP also features some specific enhancements in the microarchitecture that allows for better performance scaling for workloads that are more unique to the automotive space. One such aspect is geometry, where automotive vendors have the tendency to use absurd amounts of triangles. Imagination says they've tweaked their designs to cover these more demanding use-cases, and together with some MSAA specific optimisations they can reach up to a 60% greater performance for these automotive edge-cases, compared to the regular non-automotive IP.
Related: Imagination Technologies Group Up for Sale
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Imagination Technologies, a company known for its PowerVR GPUs and MIPS processors, saw its shares drop massively when it announced that Apple would make its own GPUs for the next iPhone. Now it is up for sale:
Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, "Imagination", "the Group") announces that over the last few weeks it has received interest from a number of parties for a potential acquisition of the whole Group. The Board of Imagination has therefore decided to initiate a formal sale process for the Group and is engaged in preliminary discussions with potential bidders.
The sale process for the MIPS and Ensigma operations, which commenced on 4 May 2017, is progressing well and indicative proposals have been received for both businesses. [...] There can be no certainty that any offer will be made for Imagination, nor that any transaction will be executed, nor as to terms of any such offer or transaction.
Also at PCMag, AppleInsider (Imagination is an AppleOutsider), and Reuters.
Imagination Technologies to design RISC-V cores:
Now better known for its PowerVR embedded GPUs, Imagination Technologies tried to enter the CPU market by purchasing MIPS Technologies and introducing microAptiv, interAptiv, and proAptiv cores in 2012.
It did not end up well, as the company had to sell its MIPS technology a few years later, and the MIPS architecture is now barely supported. But Imagination is now working on getting back into the CPU space by designing RISC-V cores.
[...] a May 2021 report by the Financial Times claims Imagination expects to invest up to $150m over the next two years to target a fresh push into the processor design market, specifically citing the RISC-V architecture.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
See also: QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes
Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies
Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
Innosilicon graphics cards based on "Fantasy One" GPU feature up to 32GB GDDR6X memory
Today at the "Fantasy One GPU Product Press Conference", Innosilicon, a Chinese company offering graphics and memory solutions unveiled its first discrete GPU.
At the event, Innosilicon revealed its plans for the Fantasy One GPU. This processor is based on Imagination graphics IP (BXT to be specific) which brings tons of innovations to the discrete GPU solutions offered by the Chinese company.
As many as four products have been revealed, including dual-GPU and single-GPU solutions. Type A is a consumer/workstation graphics card featuring a single Fantasy One GPU, which is actually a multi-chip (chiplet) design. Unfortunately, none of the news reports from China on this announcement had the exact configuration of the Fantasy One.
According to the data provided by Innoslicon, this GPU offers up to 5 TFLOPS of single-precision compute power [and a fillrate of 160 GPixel/s]. It is equipped with DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, and VGA connectors. This card is to be equipped with up to 16 GB of GDDR6(X) memory across a 128-bit interface. So far, the G6X technology has been exclusive to NVIDIA/Micron Ampere GPUs, but apparently, Innosilicon made a lot of research in PAM4 signaling and was able to unlock up to 19 Gbps memory bandwidth for their GDDR6X implementation. A relatively short memory bus will have its toll on the maximum theoretical bandwidth though, which is to go up to 304 GB/s (so somewhere in between Radeon RX 6700XT and 6600XT).
[...] The Type B [...] is a dual-GPU solution featuring two Fantasy One GPUs connected by an interface known as Innolink. The company claims up to 10 TFLOPS of computing power and 320 GPixel/s fillrates. This card can offer 32 simultaneous 1080p/60FPS streams or 64 streams at 720/30FPS. It is to feature up to 32GB of GDDR6(X) memory but is again limited by dual 128-bit interfaces from each GPU. All these cards feature a PCI-Express 4.0 interface at full X16 width.
When people are willing to pay 2-4x as much for GPUs, competition is inevitable. Intel will be joining the market with "Alchemist" discrete GPUs in Q1/Q2 2022.
Previously: Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
Imagination introduces Catapult RISC-V CPU cores
As expected, Imagination Technologies is giving another try to the CPU IP market with the Catapult RISC-V CPU cores following their previous unsuccessful attempt with the MIPS architecture, notably the Aptiv family.
Catapult RISC-V CPUs are/will be available in four distinct families for dynamic microcontrollers, real-time embedded CPUs, high-performance application CPUs, and functionally safe automotive CPUs.
The new 32-/64-bit RISC-V cores will be scalable to up to eight asymmetric coherent cores-per cluster, offer a "plethora of customer configurable options", and support optional custom accelerators. What you won't see today are block diagrams and detailed technical information about the cores because apparently, all that information is confidential even though some Catapult RISC-V cores are already shipping "in high-performance Imagination automotive GPUs". The only way to get more details today is to sign an NDA.
Also at AnandTech and Phoronix.
Previously: Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
Imagination Technologies Plans to Design RISC-V Cores
Related: Innosilicon Graphics Cards Based on "Fantasy One" GPU Feature Up to 32GB GDDR6X Memory
StarFive VisionFive 2 quad-core RISC-V SBC launched for $46 and up
As expected, StarFive has officially unveiled the JH7110 quad-core RISC-V processor with 3D GPU and the VisionFive 2 SBC. I just did not expect the company to also launch a Kickstarter campaign for the board, and the version with 2GB RAM can be had for just about $46 for "early birds".
The VisionFive 2 ships with up to 8GB RAM, HDMI 2.0 and MIPI DSI display interfaces, dual Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0/2.0 ports, a QSPI flash for the bootloader, as well as support for eMMC flash module, M.2 NVMe SSD, and microSD card storage.
Compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, it has better I/O, worse CPU performance, and potentially better GPU performance (it's an Imagination BXE-4-32), with similar price points for RAM amounts. It uses the the 100 × 72 mm "Pico-ITX" form factor like some recent RK3588 boards (RPi 4 is 85.6 mm × 56.5 mm).
Previously: Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
VisionFive V1 RISC-V Linux SBC Resurrects BeagleV Single Board Computer
Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 13 2020, @09:35PM (1 child)
Whatever happened to these guys? Thought when Apple switched out, they had no customers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 13 2020, @09:47PM
They've been in some MediaTek SoCs, but the recent Dimensity [soylentnews.org] lineup ditched them.
Here's what the article has to say (last page):
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 14 2020, @05:34PM
oh they finally see the writing on the wall in 2020: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Imagination-New-Open-Graphics [phoronix.com]
probably too little, too late for these slaveware peddlers.