Imagination Announces PowerVR Furian GPU Architecture: The Next Generation of PowerVR
by Ryan Smith on March 8, 2017 11:00 AM EST
Taking place today is Imagination Technologies’ annual tech summit in Santa Clara, California. The company’s annual summit is always a venue for major Imagination news, and this year that’s particularly the case. As the cornerstone of this year’s summit, Imagination is announcing their next PowerVR GPU architecture: Furian.
Furian marks the first new GPU architecture out of Imagination in almost 7 years. Rogue, the company’s first OpenGL ES 3.x-capable architecture, was first announced in 2010 and has become the cornerstone of Imagination’s entire GPU lineup, from wearables to high-end devices. In the intervening years, Imagination has made a number of smaller updates and optmizations to the architecture, leading to the 6, 7, and 8 series of PowerVR GPU designs. Now the company is undertaking a more radical revision to their architecture in the form of Furian, which like Rogue before it, will ultimately become the cornerstone of their GPU families.
I’ll have a deeper dive into Furian next week, but for today’s launch I want to hit the highlights of the new architecture and what Imagination’s goals are for the GPUs that will be derived from it. On that note, Imagination is not announcing any specific GPU designs today; while close partners already have beta RTL designs, the final designs and the announcement of those designs will come later in the year. But as the mobile industry is a bit more open in terms of design information due to the heavy use of IP licensing and the long design windows, it makes sense for Imagination to start talking this architecture up now, so that developers know what’s coming down the pipe.
Initially, Furian will co-exist alongside Rogue designs. The initial designs for Furian will be high-end designs, which means that Rogue will continue to cover customers’ needs for lower power and area efficient designs. In particular, the various XE designs will still be around for some time to come as Imagination’s leading design for area efficiency. XE will eventually be replaced by Furian, but this could potentially be some years down the line due to a mix of design priorities, cost, and the fact that new architecture features can hurt the area efficiency of a design.
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11186/imagination-announces-powervr-furian-gpu-architecture
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To Ryan, if there is a topic to this news on the forum, please close it.
Returning to the topic.
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Who might be the customers will want to get this chip?
1.- Remembering that the best chip from the previous generation was at nVIDIA GT 730M tier...
With the improvements from them, they could reach GT 930M levels now.
2.- As for now the confirmed ones who uses the current generation are:
- Apple A9 (GT 7600 Plus)
- Mediatek Helio X 30 (GT 7400 Plus)
- Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA (GT 7200)
3.- Considering that Apple is still working on their GPU, is hard to see them not using Furian as the last GPU from Imagination.
Meanwhile Mediatek is likely to continue with them since they are needed to a decent GPU since Mali is NOT an option for them. Also, it will be interesting to move their Helio P series to Power VR too since they are sharing the core configuration on the next generation (Helio P35) according to leaks...
Also Intel/Spreadtrum used always Power VR and is hard to move from them... the last time Intel did it, they failed so hard that killed Broxton.
4.- And well... who might be the next one? Xiaomi maybe? they will test how Mali performs, and if they doesn't get the performance they want, is likely to move to Power VR or nVIDIA GPUs... they are dead serious on the plans to show up their processors.
So guys, what do you expect on this movements on the Mobile GPU department?
PS: I edited to make this post easy to read.
by Ryan Smith on March 8, 2017 11:00 AM EST
Taking place today is Imagination Technologies’ annual tech summit in Santa Clara, California. The company’s annual summit is always a venue for major Imagination news, and this year that’s particularly the case. As the cornerstone of this year’s summit, Imagination is announcing their next PowerVR GPU architecture: Furian.
Furian marks the first new GPU architecture out of Imagination in almost 7 years. Rogue, the company’s first OpenGL ES 3.x-capable architecture, was first announced in 2010 and has become the cornerstone of Imagination’s entire GPU lineup, from wearables to high-end devices. In the intervening years, Imagination has made a number of smaller updates and optmizations to the architecture, leading to the 6, 7, and 8 series of PowerVR GPU designs. Now the company is undertaking a more radical revision to their architecture in the form of Furian, which like Rogue before it, will ultimately become the cornerstone of their GPU families.
I’ll have a deeper dive into Furian next week, but for today’s launch I want to hit the highlights of the new architecture and what Imagination’s goals are for the GPUs that will be derived from it. On that note, Imagination is not announcing any specific GPU designs today; while close partners already have beta RTL designs, the final designs and the announcement of those designs will come later in the year. But as the mobile industry is a bit more open in terms of design information due to the heavy use of IP licensing and the long design windows, it makes sense for Imagination to start talking this architecture up now, so that developers know what’s coming down the pipe.
Initially, Furian will co-exist alongside Rogue designs. The initial designs for Furian will be high-end designs, which means that Rogue will continue to cover customers’ needs for lower power and area efficient designs. In particular, the various XE designs will still be around for some time to come as Imagination’s leading design for area efficiency. XE will eventually be replaced by Furian, but this could potentially be some years down the line due to a mix of design priorities, cost, and the fact that new architecture features can hurt the area efficiency of a design.
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11186/imagination-announces-powervr-furian-gpu-architecture
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To Ryan, if there is a topic to this news on the forum, please close it.
Returning to the topic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Who might be the customers will want to get this chip?
1.- Remembering that the best chip from the previous generation was at nVIDIA GT 730M tier...
With the improvements from them, they could reach GT 930M levels now.
2.- As for now the confirmed ones who uses the current generation are:
- Apple A9 (GT 7600 Plus)
- Mediatek Helio X 30 (GT 7400 Plus)
- Spreadtrum SC9861G-IA (GT 7200)
3.- Considering that Apple is still working on their GPU, is hard to see them not using Furian as the last GPU from Imagination.
Meanwhile Mediatek is likely to continue with them since they are needed to a decent GPU since Mali is NOT an option for them. Also, it will be interesting to move their Helio P series to Power VR too since they are sharing the core configuration on the next generation (Helio P35) according to leaks...
Also Intel/Spreadtrum used always Power VR and is hard to move from them... the last time Intel did it, they failed so hard that killed Broxton.
4.- And well... who might be the next one? Xiaomi maybe? they will test how Mali performs, and if they doesn't get the performance they want, is likely to move to Power VR or nVIDIA GPUs... they are dead serious on the plans to show up their processors.
So guys, what do you expect on this movements on the Mobile GPU department?
PS: I edited to make this post easy to read.
Last edited:
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