The flagship position of the PowerVR 6 series GPU is not yet hot, and a new generation of products is coming. Today, the famous mobile phone GPU manufacturer Imaging Technologies released its latest PowerVR 7 series GPU, and the device equipped with this latest and strongest GPU will officially debut after the second half of 2015.
The PowerVR 7 series is the successor of the current PowerVR 6 series. The PowerVR 7 series will also have two branches. The 7XT series will be positioned at the high end, and the 7XE series will be positioned at the low end. According to the different positioning, the included Shader units range from half to 16. Imagination hopes to compete with competitors on all positioned SoCs.
From the perspective of architecture, the PowerVR 7 series still adopts the company's existing Rogue architecture, which was first introduced in the 6 series in 2012. With the development of time, Imagination slowly improves the architecture to improve the energy consumption ratio and expand the application scope of the GPU. The 7 series is the latest evolution of the architecture. The comparison between the 7 series and the 6 series is shown in the table below.
Specification comparison of PowerVR Series7XT, PowerVR Series7XE, PowerVR Series6XT, and PowerVR Series6XE. It can be seen that PowerVR Series7XT supports 2~16 clusters (which is often referred to as "core"). The floating point performance is single precision 256-2048Flops and double precision 128-1024Flops. Compared with PowerVR Series6XT, the specification is doubled. In terms of API, OpenGL ES is still 3.1, DirectX is upgraded to 10.0, and even 11.1 is optional.
In fact, the Rogue architecture of the 7XT series GPU is relatively perfect, but it is certainly better for the energy consumption to be higher than this indicator. Therefore, Imagination focuses on improving this aspect this time, and with the development of technology, The GPU needs to be constantly updated to meet the new API, developer needs and challenges of competitors. From these three points of view, the 6XT series is slightly outdated.
The 7XT series has added a new module, called the surface subdivision coprocessor. The main work of this module is to cooperate with the polygon processor, so as to achieve comprehensive support for the surface subdivision technology, and this surface subdivision coprocessor also provides support for the adaptive scalable texture compression technology, The new 7XT series GPU can support the Android Extension Pack, while the 6XT series GPU does not.
In terms of other modules, Imaging has also made improvements and upgrades. The geometric performance of the multi-faceted processor has been doubled to reduce the bottleneck effect. At the same time, the performance of the data computing processor has been increased to three times the previous performance. This improvement makes the new 7XT series GPU more comfortable in the face of large amounts of fragmented data, which Imagination believes is very important.
Finally, the performance of the thread block scheduling unit has also been upgraded. The main task of this module is to reduce the degree of interdependence between modules. The 7-series GPUs can now more frequently mobilize each USC to work. Among the 6-series GPUs, a single USC may not accept new processing tasks because the current tasks have not been completed, The performance improvement of this unit can make the efficiency of the 7-series GPU higher.
The internal structure of the 7 series USC is similar to that of the 6 series USC, The number of ALUs in FP16 and FP32 has not changed, but the number of special function units (SFUs) has slightly changed. First, the SFUs in the 7 series can now support the operations of FP16 and FP32 at the same time, while the GPUs in the 6 series will hand over all calculations to FP32. The function upgrade of this SFU enables the 7 series GPUs to flexibly allocate computing tasks, thus reducing the energy consumption of GPUs.
The other upgrade of SFU is the collaborative processing capability with ALU. On the 6-series GPU, SFU and ALU can only be enabled separately, while on the 7-series GPU, SFU can assist ALU in data processing, so that the data to be processed can be compressed to a certain extent, making the processing flow of the same data less.
At the same time, the GPU of the 7XT series also supports FP64 processing (although this is an optional additional function, depending on the specific product). FP64 processing means that each USC is equipped with an ALU of FP64, so that the processing capacity can reach 2FLOPS/USC/cycle.
Finally, there are 7XT series native support and 7XE series optional GPU hardware isolation area. This function is to create up to eight mutually unaffected areas for computing through virtualization technology. This function has already appeared on many CPUs. Adding GPUs to the GPUs also enables the GPUs of the 7 series to work better with the CPUs that support this function. In practical terms, This function also creates a "sandbox" environment for applications. Applications in one area cannot cross over to other parts of the system. This double-edged sword function can protect the security of important information in the system (bank accounts, health payment information, etc.) on the one hand, and on the other hand, manufacturers can use this technology to make prison break or ROOT equipment more difficult.
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