Imagination Technologies launches advanced multi-processor graphics IP family

With the POWERVR SGX543MP family Imagination continues to extend its leadership of the embedded graphics acceleration market with blistering POWERVR solutions which address the rapidly growing demands for high performance graphics in a wide range of consumer electronics segments.

Imagination’s graphics IP cores now range from SGX520, the world’s smallest OpenGL ES 2.0 mobile core, to SGX543MP16 for high-performance console and computing devices. Some of the innovative technology behind POWERVR SGX543MP is being revealed in a keynote presentation at the 4th annual Multicore Expo (March 16 - 19 2009, Santa Clara, USA.)

Tony King-Smith, VP marketing Imagination Technologies says: “The performance delivered by our latest POWERVR SGX543MP family is the ultimate statement of the highly linear scalability of our unique Series5XT architecture. With the ability to combine up to 16 SGX543 GP-GPU cores on a single SoC, we are now able to deliver capabilities to our licensing partners previously only thought the domain of the discrete GPU chipset vendors, while maintaining our unrivalled power, area and bandwidth efficiency.”

One of the unique features of the recently announced POWERVR Series5XT architecture is that it enables highly linear scaling of all aspects of GPU performance, specifically vertex shading, pixel shading, primitive setup and overall GP-GPU functionality, whilst maintaining full software compatibility and with virtually no overhead in bandwidth usage.

The POWERVR SGX543MP family enables up to sixteen cores of POWERVR SGX543 programmable GP-GPU logic to be integrated in a high performance, multi-processor graphics solution without performance or silicon area compromises. Taking the already high-performance four-pipe POWERVR SGX543, and then scaling that performance up to between eight and 64 pipelines, POWERVR SGX543MP delivers performance comparable to many desktops, laptops and games consoles.

At 200MHz core frequency an SGX543MP4 (four cores) will deliver 133 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 4Gpixels/sec. Higher frequencies or a larger number of cores each deliver more performance. At 400MHz core frequency an SGX543MP8 (eight cores) will deliver 532 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 16Gpixels/sec.

Continues King-Smith: “This multi-core extension to the scalability of the POWERVR SGX architecture, beyond the existing POWERVR SGX520 and SGX53x and 54x families, takes our highly efficient technology into new market segments. Additionally the leading and ever-growing ecosystem of POWERVR Insider, which is of great value to our licensing partners and their OEM customers, will both benefit from, and further develop with, this significant expansion of the family.”

The highly efficient POWEVR SGX543MP family delivers linear progression in vertex and pixel processing performance, unlike competitive solutions which scale only pixel performance. An SGX543MP2 delivers effectively twice the performance of a single SGX543 without compromise. And for a given workload the same bandwidth is required no matter how many cores are deployed – SGX543MP delivers faster performance by dividing the work on –demand, dynamically load balanced in parallel between cores.

The POWERVR Series5XT architecture builds on the highly efficient Series5 architecture, which ensures that maximum performance is achieved across a wide range of applications, regardless of whether the content is dominated by polygon throughput, pixel processing, high fill rate or any combination of these. Other architectures that use separate polygon and pixel processing units cannot achieve the sustained throughput or silicon utilisation of POWERVR SGX graphics cores.

Part of POWERVR Series5XT, USSE2 (Universal Scalable Shader Engine2), the main programmable processing unit within each POWERVR SGX543 pipeline, incorporates a major upgrade of the data path to deliver vastly improved vector processing performance and overall throughput. This datapath upgrade is one of the key reasons why SGX543 delivers up to 2x the performance for ‘vector-heavy’ applications compared to earlier POWERVR SGX cores

USSE2 is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. These tasks are automatically broken down into processing packets which are then scheduled across a number of hardware multi-threaded execution units for maximum processing efficiency.