PowerVR To Make Mobile Graphics, GPU Compute a Three-Way Race Again

MojoKid writes "For over 10 years, the desktop and mobile graphics space has been dominated by two players: Nvidia and AMD/ATI. After 3dfx collapsed, there was a brief period of time when it looked as though Imagination Technologies might establish itself as a third option. Ultimately, that didn't happen — the company's tile-based rendering solution, Kyro, failed to gain mass-market support and faded after two generations. Now, there's a flurry of evidence to suggest that Imagination Technologies plans to re-enter PC market, but from the opposite direction. Rather than building expensive discrete solutions, IT is focused on deploying GPUs that can challenge Nvidia and AMD solutions in tablets, mobile phones, and possibly netbooks. Over the past two weeks, Imagination Technologies has announced new, higher-end versions of its Power VR Series 6 GPU, claiming that the new Power VR G6230 and G6430 go '"all out," adding incremental extra area for maximum performance whilst minimising power consumption.' There's a new ray-tracing SDK out and a post discussing how PowerVR is utilizing GPU Compute and OpenCL to offload and accelerate CPU-centric tasks." Update: 06/17 17:53 GMT by T : Related: An anonymous reader adds a link to a new project from the FSF to reverse engineer the PowerVR SGX.

Umm, no

[TheRaven64]

The mobile graphics space has been dominated by one player: PowerVR. ARM and nVidia are more recent entrants. AMD doesn't yet have anything in this space, although that will change very soon.

Re:Does Linus know about this?

[dmesg0]

PowerVR drivers are either closed source for ARM or nearly nonexistent for x86 (Intel Poulsbo) on linux.

Re:Umm, no

[dmesg0]

AMD used to have mobile core, but they sold it to Qualcomm. It's now called Qualcomm Adreno.

Re:Not news

[UnknowingFool]

Yes. It's not like PowerVR isn't already used in smart phones and tablets today. Most people just have not heard of them. If you are using an Apple mobile device, you are using PowerVR. If you are using a Sony PS Vita, you are using PowerVR. If you are using a Samsung Galaxy, you are using PowerVR.

Re:Umm, no

[dmesg0]

Their statistics are per SoC vendor, not by GPU core vendor. E.g. Apple and TI SoC come with PowerVR, Samsung SoC contain Mali (on most popular devices) or PowerVR.