Imagination Technologies redefines edge AI and graphics system design with the launch of Imagination E-Series GPU IP. E-Series leverages its highly efficient parallel processing architecture to provide exceptional graphics performance while also scaling from 2 to 200 TOPS INT8/FP8 for AI workloads. It offers a versatile and programmable solution for future edge applications including graphics, desktop applications, natural language processing on smartphones, industrial computer vision, and vehicle autonomy.

Two new technologies underpin E-Series' potential to transform edge system design:

• Neural Cores: Scaling up to 200 TOPS (INT8/FP8), these cores deliver significant acceleration for AI and compute workloads.
• Burst Processors: A highly innovative solution delivering a 35% improvement in average power efficiency for edge applications.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 gaming-oriented graphics card has been tested mostly by Chinese hardware publications, but Japan's PC Watch has managed to get hold of a sample unit configured with 16 GB GDDR6 (14 Gbps) for evaluation purposes and soon published their findings in a "HotHot REVIEW!" The MTT S80 GPU appears to be based on PowerVR architecture (developed by Imagination Technologies), but official Moore Threads literature boasts that their own Chunxaio design is behind all proceedings with 4096 "MUSA" cores. The GPU's clock speed is set at 1.8 GHz, and maximum compute performance has been measured at 14.2 TFLOPS. A 256-bit memory bus grants a bandwidth transfer rate of 448 GB/s. PC Watch notes that the card's support for PCIe Gen 5 x 16 (offering up to 128 GB/s bandwidth) is quite surprising, given the early nature of this connection standard.

Moore Threads has claimed in the past that their cards support Direct X, but PC Watch has discovered that the S80 does not work with DX12, and their tests also demonstrated significant compatibility issues under DX11—with plenty of system freezes and error messages logged. The reviewer(s) had to downshift in some cases to DX9 game environments, in order to gather reliable/stable data. TPU's GPU-Z utility is shown to have no registration information for the S80, and it cannot read the GPU's clock. PC Watch compared their sample unit to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card—the entry level 2016-era GPU managed to best the newer competition in terms of in-game performance and power efficiency.

If you owned an Apocalypse 3d/3dx or Matrox m3D, you would've been one of many gamers that had bought a PowerVR Series 1 based 3D graphics accelerator and was both excited and underwhelmed at the same time. Released originally in 1996 and the PCX1 manufactured a 500 nm and a core clock speed of whopping 60 MHz, it was the only direct competitor of 3dfx's original Voodoo graphics card, which was technically slower at 50 MHz, but delivered a lot better in terms of 3D quality. Here we are in 2022 and Imagination Technologies, the company behind the PCX1 and the die shrunk PCX2 that was launched a year later, is releasing the drivers for both 3D accelerators as open source. Outside of a big nostalgia trip for those that might still have their card knocking around, there's questionable value in these drivers.

The second generation of PowerVR GPU's ended up powering the Sega Dreamcast with the third generation ending up in PC GPUs that were competitive with the NVIDIA GeForce 256, at least until NVIDIA changed from SDR to DDR memory. The most unique part of the PowerVR Series 1 was that the 3D accelerator could use the main 2D display cards memory as a framebuffer over the PCI bus. Sadly most games didn't support the PowerSGL API at the time and weren't able to take full advantage of the hardware when DirectX 3.0 was used. The open source drivers are provided as is and it seems like some libraries are missing for the Tomb Raider port for the PoverVR Series 1 3D accelerators, but beyond that, there should be no limitations.

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.

Apple has today patented a new approach to how it uses memory in the System-on-Chip (SoC) subsystem. With the announcement of the M1 processor, Apple has switched away from the traditional Intel-supplied chips and transitioned into a fully custom SoC design called Apple Silicon. The new designs have to integrate every component like the Arm CPU and a custom GPU. Both of these processors need good memory access, and Apple has figured out a solution to the problem of having both the CPU and the GPU accessing the same pool of memory. The so-called UMA (unified memory access) represents a bottleneck because both processors share the bandwidth and the total memory capacity, which would leave one processor starving in some scenarios.

Apple has patented a design that aims to solve this problem by combining high-bandwidth cache DRAM as well as high-capacity main DRAM. "With two types of DRAM forming the memory system, one of which may be optimized for bandwidth and the other of which may be optimized for capacity, the goals of bandwidth increase and capacity increase may both be realized, in some embodiments," says the patent, " to implement energy efficiency improvements, which may provide a highly energy-efficient memory solution that is also high performance and high bandwidth." The patent got filed way back in 2016 and it means that we could start seeing this technology in the future Apple Silicon designs, following the M1 chip.

Update 21:14 UTC: We have been reached out by Mr. Kerry Creeron, an attorney with the firm of Banner & Witcoff, who provided us with additional insights about the patent. Mr. Creeron has provided us with his personal commentary about it, and you can find Mr. Creeron's quote below.

MediaTek, the world's 4th largest global fabless semiconductor company, today launched its newest chips in the smartphone gaming-focused G series - the MediaTek Helio G25 and G35. The latest chips feature MediaTek HyperEngine game technology for faster, smoother performance, enhanced power efficiency, and brilliant graphics.

The new chipsets always keep you connected and deliver the lowest latency gaming experience. They also offer enhanced imaging features, making these G-series chipsets a perfect fit for photography enthusiasts and gamers alike.

Imagination Technologies announces the tenth generation of its PowerVR graphics architecture, the IMG A-Series. The fastest GPU IP ever released, IMG A-Series evolves the PowerVR GPU architecture to fulfil the graphics and compute needs of the full spectrum of next-generation devices. Designed to be "The GPU of Everything" IMG A-Series is the ultimate solution for multiple markets, from automotive, AIoT, and computing through to DTV/STB/OTT, mobile and server.

The IMG A-Series' multi-dimensional approach to performance scalability ranges from 1 pixel per clock (PPC) parts for the entry-level market right up to 2 TFLOP cores for performance devices, and beyond that to multi-core solutions for cloud applications. Dr. Ron Black, CEO, Imagination Technologies, says: "IMG A-Series is our most important GPU launch since we delivered the first mobile PowerVR GPU 15 years ago and the best GPU IP for mobile ever made. It offers the best performance over sustained time periods and at low power budgets across all markets. It really is the GPU of everything."

Imagination Technologies announces a new, high performance GPU core that supports the multiple, ultra-high resolution displays for cluster, Head-Up Display (HUD) and infotainment that automotive manufacturers are fitting to car interiors from 2018 onwards. Thanks to an 80% fillrate density improvement over the previous generation, the Furian Architecture-based four-cluster PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 GPU can simultaneously drive up to six 4K screens with complex UIs at 60fps.

Leveraging its built-in hardware virtualization capability, the new four-cluster PowerVR Series8XT enables automotive OEMs to deliver secure, high-performance graphics capabilities for a vehicle's many displays. PowerVR hardware virtualization can provide a complete separation of services and applications, ensuring they remain secure against system intrusion or data corruption. The platform can support up to eight applications or services running in separate containers at once and automotive OEMs can deploy and remove services at will without affecting others running at the same time.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 2.0 provisional specification. OpenCL 2.0 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard that is designed to further simplify cross-platform, parallel programming while enabling a significantly richer range of algorithms and programming patterns to be easily accelerated. As the foundation for these increased capabilities, OpenCL 2.0 defines an enhanced execution model and a subset of the C11 and C++11 memory model, synchronization and atomic operations. The release of the specification in provisional form is to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback before specification finalization, which is expected within 6 months. The OpenCL 2.0 provisional specification and reference cards are available here.

"The OpenCL working group has combined developer feedback with emerging hardware capabilities to create a state-of-the-art parallel programming platform - OpenCL 2.0," said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. "OpenCL continues to gather momentum on both desktop and mobile devices. In addition to enabling application developers it is providing foundational, portable acceleration for middleware libraries, engines and higher-level programming languages that need to take advantage of heterogeneous compute resources including CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and FPGAs."

Although NVIDIA's Tegra line of SoCs are among the best performing there are on the market; the high-end SoC market is dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung. These chips are built from scratch by the companies, but the underlying CPU and GPU architectures are licensed from ARM, and the likes of Imagination Technologies, respectively. Imagination's PowerVR graphics cores make up over 80 percent of the embedded GPU market-share. There's a big change of plans at NVIDIA. The company is beginning to think that its expertise in GPU is better proliferated in the mobile SoC space not by waiting for Tegra to gain a foothold, but by licencing its GPU IP (intellectual property) to whoever is willing pay up, much in the same way ARM and Imagination do.

NVIDIA spokesperson David Shannon, in a recent blog post, wrote: "our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market... We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers."

Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia technologies company, is now shipping its Caustic Series2 PC boards, the R2500 and R2100, which accelerate PowerVR OpenRL applications including the Caustic Visualizer viewport plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max and the Neon viewport in Rhinoceros 5 from Robert McNeel and Associates.

The Caustic Series2 is the first family of high performance ray tracing accelerator PC boards using Imagination's unique ray tracing technologies in the world's first chipset dedicated to high performance, fully interactive ray tracing in a workstation environment.

Acer America today announced its entry into the thin client market with a new commercial offering, the Acer Veriton N Series. The new thin and rich clients provide simplified manageability and energy-efficiency in a secure, space-saving form factor for virtual environments. These practical systems are designed for small and medium businesses, call centres and customers in education, financial services, healthcare and government wanting to tightly manage data, while reducing overall costs.

By increasing hardware utilization and consolidation, the Acer Veriton N Series provides superb performance while keeping operational costs and power consumption low. Centralized processing makes it easy to manage data and hardware assets, monitor system access and enforce security policies and procedures, significantly increasing internal data security.
"Our new thin client line will help organizations meet today's reality of ever shrinking budgets by simplifying IT without compromising on business deliverables," said Michael O'Beirne, Acer senior director, commercial product marketing. "The Acer N Series are easy to configure, maintain and manage, while reducing the overall cost of ownership."

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated mobile devices graphics chip shipments for 2011. Mobile devices include smartphones, tablets, cameras, vehicles, and game consoles.

The market for smart mobile devices is soaring. Mobile devices are not necessarily replacing the PC, but they are outselling PCs. Increasingly mobile devices have a graphics processor and those processors are integrated in the device's system on a chip (SoC) application processor.

Remember PowerVR GPUs which last saw light when GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 were around? The company behind it, Imagination Technologies, is working on a discrete PCI-Express GPGPU card for workstations targeting the media industry, which provides real-time ray-tracing acceleration. After its exile from PC graphics, Imagination Technologies worked on and achieved prevalence in embedded GPUs, GPUs embedded into ARM System-on-chips (SoCs), found in smartphones and tablets. This kept its GPU IP and R&D more than afloat.

In 2011, the company acquired Caustic Graphics, a smaller and much newer startup, which was working on dedicated ray-tracing accelerators, and had come up with a working FCPGA chip. Together the company is in the final stages of preparing a product that will bring Imagination Technologies back to the PC, only this time as a GPGPU (such as NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FireStream), and not a display-GPU. The product will be backed by OpenRL Brazil 3.0 SDK. This product will launch some time in 2012.