The Register is reporting that Imagination Technologies has recently announced two multi-core graphics processing units, for use in mobile devices. The chips are being called the POWERVR SGX543MP, with the last two letters on the end of SGX543MP being replaced with 2 or 16, to represent the variance in the amount of cores.
This news is rather interesting as MacRumors says Apple is an investor and licensee of Imagination Technologies, and they are the company who currently makes the graphics chips for the iPhone and iPhone 3G. This could lead one to believe that these new chips will be included in a new revision of Apple"s iPhone, expected to be announced/released around June or July this year.
Here are some of the features of the mobile GPU, according to Imagination Technologies" press release:
- * maintains the highest performance per mW of any embedded graphics core, a key benefit of POWERVR SGX
* highly linear scaling (over 95% efficiency) of performance in both geometry (vertex processing) and rasterisation (pixel/fragment processing)
* dynamic load balancing and on-demand task allocation at the pipeline level
* no fixed allocation of given pixels to specific cores, enabling maximum processing power to be allocated to the areas of highest on-screen action
* scalable GP-GPU compute power, which can be fully utilised through all Khronos APIs including OpenGL ES 2.x, OpenVG 1.x and OpenCL
* use any number of cores from 2-16, even or odd
* no additional work for software developers; using one driver stack for all SGX cores means applications see a common SGX architecture via the standard APIs regardless of number of cores used
* no additional CPU load when using multiple cores or loss of performance
Expect to see more details on these released shortly.