Friday, November 19th 2021
Innosilicon's Fenghua GPU Based on Imagination Technologies IMG-B Series GPU Cores
The somewhat surprise announcement of the Innosilicon Fenghua No.1 server graphics card took many by surprise, but it seems like much of the tech media, us included, weren't paying attention, as there were hints about this card over a year ago. It came from no-one other than Imagination Technologies CMO, David Harold, in an official blog post that was posted on the 13th of October 2020.
The blog post was titled "Back in the high-performance game" and in it David Harold was reminiscing about his close to 20 years at Imigationation Technologies and how the company had started out in the 3D accelerator business with the Kyro "GPU". He goes on to mention last year's IMG A-Series GPU and then moves on to the new IMG-B Series and mentions how it's the 11th generation of the PowerVR architecture and how it has 70 percent higher compute density compared to existing desktop GPUs. He also mentions that Imagination Technologies has five customers working on products for the desktop, performance laptop and "cloud spaces" based on the PowerVR architecture and then goes on to mention Innosilicon by name and pointing out that they have just launched an IMG-B Series BXT multi-core GPU in an add-in card form-factor.
In other words, the Innosilicon Fenghua GPU looks like it will be one of a handful of new products that we'll see bring some kind of competition to AMD and Nvidia, but so far we have no idea as to how these products will perform. The IMG-B Series BXT is the highest performance part in the IMG-B Series of GPUs, but so far Imagination Technologies haven't revealed any information about the BXT SKUs. Hopefully we'll see something that will be competitive in the mid-range at the very least, especially considering that the PowerVR architecture has had ray tracing support for several years now. Ideally some of the promised products will be for companies selling outside of the PRC and with support for mainstream operating systems, but for now, we're just going to have to wait and see.
Source:
Imagination Technologies
The blog post was titled "Back in the high-performance game" and in it David Harold was reminiscing about his close to 20 years at Imigationation Technologies and how the company had started out in the 3D accelerator business with the Kyro "GPU". He goes on to mention last year's IMG A-Series GPU and then moves on to the new IMG-B Series and mentions how it's the 11th generation of the PowerVR architecture and how it has 70 percent higher compute density compared to existing desktop GPUs. He also mentions that Imagination Technologies has five customers working on products for the desktop, performance laptop and "cloud spaces" based on the PowerVR architecture and then goes on to mention Innosilicon by name and pointing out that they have just launched an IMG-B Series BXT multi-core GPU in an add-in card form-factor.
25 Comments on Innosilicon's Fenghua GPU Based on Imagination Technologies IMG-B Series GPU Cores
Chinese Innosilicon Fenghua No.1 Graphics Card Supports PCIe 4.0, HDMI 2.1, GDDR6X, & DirectX | TechPowerUp
I hope it become at least viable in low end market though, WTO don't care about subsidy anyway, and any competion is good competition in current GPU market hellscape.
One thing still remains from Kyro times... it is still tile based rendering.
No Amd and Nvidia only bullshitbingo :laugh:
AMD future with the great drivers and GPU will be in the 99 cents corner.:p
AMD drivers with Fullscreen in 1920x1200 have a great quality: (First i though i smoke to much .....
I don't think this thing will have windows support really... it would be marketed then as such.That's not smoke, but Acid dude :pimp:
It's not as if Imagination Technologies couldn't write a driver for Windows if their customers had the need for it.
The Innosilicon chip is not likely to have Windows support, but as there are four more products to be expected in the near terms, I would very much expect Windows support on one or two of those. I mean, it's possible that the laptop version will be in a Chromebook or something similar, but since these are supposed to be discrete solutions and not integrated into an SoC, I very much doubt it.
How do you even make that mistake unless you're mashing your forehead on the K/B writing this.
To put into perspective a Mali G77 will scale from 7 cores to 16 cores, each of those having 32 FPUs. So about 8 CUs from AMD or SM from Nvidia(before Ampere).
So well, I think that the efficiency really comes down from them being designed from the grounds up to be for mobile-first and would lose any power efficiency.
About area, afaik, mobile designers use denser libraries. There's probably some reason for it, but you can see that for the entire SoC and not just the GPU.
SuperH2 and PowerVR were the backbone of thr Sega Dreamcast&NAOMI board.
Updated the article to reflect how long ago it was.
Regardless, I think most people missed it or had forgotten about it, since not a single article that mentioned the Innosilicon card mentioned Imagination Technologies or PowerVR, bur rather expected it to be a "from scratch" design.
Imagination?