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Innosilicon's Fenghua GPU Based on Imagination Technologies IMG-B Series GPU Cores

TheLostSwede

TheLostSwede

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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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
An interesting scenario, what would happen if you mix loads of Chinese government subsidy with PowerVR?

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.
 
I think AMD should have bought Imagination some time ago...
 
I've long speculated that someone will eventually start making desktop GPUs either based on ARM designs or some other mobile design because they're much more efficient per area and power and it could genuinely be competitive. Seems like I could be right.
 
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The amount of juvenile marketing crap in the picture is burning my eyes. :cry::roll:
 
good luck to them, we sure need more competition
 
Yeah, but I cannot find from where really the Direct X support came from? From a hat like rabbit in form of wishful thing? Linux and Android only judging from IT site. A wrapper, yeah, native? Dunno.

One thing still remains from Kyro times... it is still tile based rendering.
 
Ferrum Master said:
Yeah, but I cannot find from where really the Direct X support came from? From a hat like rabbit in form of wishful thing? Linux and Android only judging from IT site. A wrapper, yeah, native? Dunno.

One thing still remains from Kyro times... it is still tile based rendering.
Click to expand...

vulkan
 
Ferrum Master said:
Yeah, but I cannot find from where really the Direct X support came from? From a hat like rabbit in form of wishful thing? Linux and Android only judging from IT site. A wrapper, yeah, native? Dunno.

One thing still remains from Kyro times... it is still tile based rendering.
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that Intel used the PowerVR GPU cores at one point and at least up until the Series8XE there was Direct3D 9.3 support, although after that I can't find any details of any specific Direct3D support. It's unlikely that it was hard for Imagination Technologies to add it back.
 
Hmmmm thats a great thing for the future for everyone, Intel GPU and Imagination Technologies GPU.
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 .....
20210112-204938.jpg
 
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TheLostSwede said:
Keep in mind that Intel used the PowerVR GPU cores at one point and at least up until the Series8XE there was Direct3D 9.3 support, although after that I can't find any details of any specific Direct3D support. It's unlikely that it was hard for Imagination Technologies to add it back.
Click to expand...
I have a strong feeling that most was done in SW than HW for those Intel Atoms. Just for basics to emulate WDDM compatible effects for GUI. Nobody knows really. Wiki says that even older archs had Dx10 support, then the latter ones had only Dx9.3... it is all a bit a wild guess.

I don't think this thing will have windows support really... it would be marketed then as such.

seth1911 said:
First i though i smoke to much .....
Click to expand...
That's not smoke, but Acid dude :pimp:
 
Nah i dont consume acid in those days, only on a nice summer evening :p :laugh:
 
Ferrum Master said:
I have a strong feeling that most was done in SW than HW for those Intel Atoms. Just for basics to emulate WDDM compatible effects for GUI. Nobody knows really. Wiki says that even older archs had Dx10 support, then the latter ones had only Dx9.3... it is all a bit a wild guess.

I don't think this thing will have windows support really... it would be marketed then as such.
Click to expand...
Nah, it was not, it was proper Direct3D, it wouldn't have made any kind of sense to emulate it through a different API, it would've been way too resource intensive on those SoCs.
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.
 
AusWolf said:
The amount of juvenile marketing crap in the picture is burning my eyes. :cry::roll:
Click to expand...

The capital S in cardS is the cherry on top isn't it.

How do you even make that mistake unless you're mashing your forehead on the K/B writing this.
 
Vayra86 said:
The capital S in cardS is the cherry on top isn't it.

How do you even make that mistake unless you're mashing your forehead on the K/B writing this.
Click to expand...
Anything is possible when you don't care.
 
At least they are trying. If we pee on anyone trying to break into the market... we are left with amd and nvidia. Which is not good!
 
Vya Domus said:
I've long speculated that someone will eventually start making desktop GPUs either based on ARM designs or some other mobile design because they're much more efficient per area and power and it could genuinely be competitive. Seems like I could be right.
Click to expand...
Scalability is an issue though, those mobile designs have some whole other focus rather than trying to cram as many 32-bit FPUs into a single GPU as possible.

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.
 
I would like to see a PowerVR discreet desktop GPU that Competes with AMD and nvidia, and intel.

SuperH2 and PowerVR were the backbone of thr Sega Dreamcast&NAOMI board.
 
as there were hints about this card over a month ago
Click to expand...

You know if y'all just click that source link below the article, you can see that the blog post is indeed dated over a month ago... more like more than a month and a year ago. The said blog post above is dated 13th October 2020. Don't need to even read the blog post, just check the date above it. No need to Google some other article covering it, the source of the above post itself is over a year old.
 
Fouquin said:
Woah I feel like I stepped into a time machine. This is news from October 13th, 2020.
Click to expand...
My bad, it really was a long time ago, yet we're only now seeing the first actual details of the final product.
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.
 
What's this "Imigationation Technologies", LOL?
Imagination?
 
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