PowerVR To Make Mobile Graphics, GPU Compute a Three-Way Race Again

MojoKid writes "For over 10 years, the desktop and mobile graphics space has been dominated by two players: Nvidia and AMD/ATI. After 3dfx collapsed, there was a brief period of time when it looked as though Imagination Technologies might establish itself as a third option. Ultimately, that didn't happen — the company's tile-based rendering solution, Kyro, failed to gain mass-market support and faded after two generations. Now, there's a flurry of evidence to suggest that Imagination Technologies plans to re-enter PC market, but from the opposite direction. Rather than building expensive discrete solutions, IT is focused on deploying GPUs that can challenge Nvidia and AMD solutions in tablets, mobile phones, and possibly netbooks. Over the past two weeks, Imagination Technologies has announced new, higher-end versions of its Power VR Series 6 GPU, claiming that the new Power VR G6230 and G6430 go '"all out," adding incremental extra area for maximum performance whilst minimising power consumption.' There's a new ray-tracing SDK out and a post discussing how PowerVR is utilizing GPU Compute and OpenCL to offload and accelerate CPU-centric tasks." Update: 06/17 17:53 GMT by T : Related: An anonymous reader adds a link to a new project from the FSF to reverse engineer the PowerVR SGX.

Comments

Umm, no

[TheRaven64]

The mobile graphics space has been dominated by one player: PowerVR. ARM and nVidia are more recent entrants. AMD doesn't yet have anything in this space, although that will change very soon.

Re:Umm, no

[dmesg0]

AMD used to have mobile core, but they sold it to Qualcomm. It's now called Qualcomm Adreno.

Re:Umm, no

[dmesg0]

Their statistics are per SoC vendor, not by GPU core vendor. E.g. Apple and TI SoC come with PowerVR, Samsung SoC contain Mali (on most popular devices) or PowerVR.

Re:Umm, no

[greg1104]

Intel is starting to provide more serious competition to both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI too, on the laptop end of mobile computing. The latest rev of their graphics chipset, the HD 4000, is more than enough GPU power for many people.

I hope they can do better on drivers

[PhrostyMcByte]

The PowerVR GPUs integrated into Intel's Atoms are great -- in theory. The drivers are so terrible they can't even run Windows 7's aero at acceptable FPS, let alone a game. They also don't bother to support 64-bit, or any x86 Linux other than 32-bit MeeGo.

I don't know if it's PowerVR or Intel, but someone needs to get their drivers in order before they'll have a chance of encroaching on any of the existing players.

Re:I hope they can do better on drivers

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm inclined to wonder if their 'tile-based rendering' scheme for cleverly throwing away work that doesn't actually have to be done is more driver-based than some of the competing GPU vendor's schemes, making them rather touchy about opening that.

It could also just be that they have some sort of inertial paranoia thing going on as a company; but it certainly seems like it might have had to be something good if Intel, Chipzilla himself, couldn't wring decent drivers out of them for their GMA500-based parts.

That isn't exactly a spat on the debian mailing lists over firmware-linux-nonfree, that's a potentially huge design win that ended up sucking fairly hard wherever it showed its miserable face...

Re:I hope they can do better on drivers

[nogginthenog]

But it kicked ass on the Dreamcast back in 1999!

Re:I hope they can do better on drivers

[viperidaenz]

Wait, your 3D graphics card has solid drivers but no 3D support?

Not news

[dmesg0]

It's already more than 2 players in mobile space: ARM with its Mali core, Qualcomm with Adreno (former ATI/AMD), NVidia with Tegra and IT with PowerVR.
In addition, Intel already uses PowerVR cores in some Atom CPUs (targeted for tablets).
Since they are still talking about mobile, how is that news?

Re:Not news

[UnknowingFool]

Yes. It's not like PowerVR isn't already used in smart phones and tablets today. Most people just have not heard of them. If you are using an Apple mobile device, you are using PowerVR. If you are using a Sony PS Vita, you are using PowerVR. If you are using a Samsung Galaxy, you are using PowerVR.

Re:Does Linus know about this?

[dmesg0]

PowerVR drivers are either closed source for ARM or nearly nonexistent for x86 (Intel Poulsbo) on linux.

Re:Does Linus know about this?

[0123456]

Nvidia must have paid PowerVR to start releasing mobile chips so Linus won't be able to say they're the worst hardware manufacturer for Linux any more.

Intel: 59% of market

[vinn]

Not entirely sure what is meant by "dominated" - Intel has 59% of the market (source: http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Grabbed-GPU-Market-Share-from-Nvidia-Intel-in-Q4/ ). I think what was meant was something like, "AMD and nVidia have dominated the GPU market for serious gamer geeks". The rest of us running our Latitude work laptops could care less what kind of GPU is in it because they've all been sufficiently powerful for years.

Re:Intel: 59% of market

[Henriok]

You can surely dominate in other respects than market share, no? Look att Apple who completely dominated the cell phone industry from the day they released the iPhone, with exactly 0% market share. Domination can be measured in the means others take to counter the attack. Everyone scuttles against Apple or is about to perish. nVidia and AMD surely dominates the desktop GPU market before Intel since it'sIntel that's playing catch up in means of power and features.

Re:Intel: 59% of market

[UnknowingFool]

Yes the point is a little muddled. NVidia and ATI are the two major players in the discrete GPU space. For mobile devices, very few discrete players exist as the GPUs are often part of the chip in a SOC design. For instance Qualcomm's Snapdragon, TI's OMAP, Apple's A4/A5, nVidia's Tegra. If anything PowerVR is more like ARM in that they license out their designs for others to build.

Re:Must have

[rsilvergun]

I'm holding out for 11/10ths.