Imagination Technologies, a graphics-chip designer that supplies the
graphics tech in the iPad and iPhone, offers some tantalizing insights
into what could power the next iPad.
CNET spoke Wednesday with Tony King-Smith, vice president of
marketing at Imagination Technologies, about what's coming down the
pike. While he would not confirm what's inside future iPads, it's a safe
bet that Apple -- which has a 9.5 percent stake in the U.K. company --
will continue to tap its technology.
Q: Imagination chips are inside the newest
iPad and iPhone, correct?
King-Smith: The [graphics] core currently in the iPad and iPhone is [Imagination's] PowerVR SGX544.
What's next for Imagination?
King-Smith: The PowerVR Series6 "Rogue." The big thing is that it
enables you to do much more on the [graphics processing unit]. For
example, it uses the latest API from Khronos, OpenGL ES 3.0.
And Series6 is fully optimized for GPU Compute and designed for OpenCL. Our mainstream cores are now intersecting with [achieving]
Xbox and
PlayStation 3-class graphics.
(Editor's
note: GPU Compute refers to utilizing the GPU to handle more of the
processing. That is, "offloading" more tasks from the central processing
unit, or CPU.)
What would a Series6 do for a future iPad -- or any tablet for that matter?
King-Smith: You have tablets with very-high-resolution displays so you
need more GPU horsepower to drive every pixel on that display. And more shader horsepower allows more sophisticated effects.
GPU
compute is particularly well suited for image processing, so taking
camera input and post-processing it, for example.
Or using the GPU to make products much more aware of their environment.
Using cameras and various other sensors and feeding that into the GPU.
Hypothetically
speaking, could you squeeze high-end Imagination graphics into, let's
say, a 7.9-inch tablet like the iPad Mini with a Retina-class display?
King-Smith: Of course. Look at the Samsung Galaxy S4. That has got a
PowerVR Series5XT GPU in it. That's driving a full 1080p display on a
5-inch phone -- an extremely constrained form factor.
(Editor's note: The Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch 1,920x1,080 pixel display, which comes to a whopping 441 pixels per inch).
Apple seems to be putting greater emphasis on the GPU. How would you describe the difference between a GPU and CPU?
King-Smith: What's incredibly distorting is the number of [processor]
cores. If you look at a quad-core CPU, that's all about scheduling
various sequential tasks in the operating system and sharing them around
the CPUs. Very different from a quad-core GPU. For example, in a
quad-core 544, each of those graphics cores has four pipelines. So a 544
has 16 execution pipes. That's what matters.
The more GPU cores
you have, you can pretty much linearly scale the performance...better
than 95 percent. That's the fundamental difference from a CPU. When you
add CPU cores, it doesn't double or quadruple the performance. That's
because they're all sharing memory and the way tasks are allocated and
so on.
When can we expect Series6 Rogue silicon?
King-Smith: We've already got 10 licensees. Silicon is coming out in the
second half. And you'll see some strong platforms coming out very
shortly with Series5 with OpenGL and GPU compute too.
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