Vivante Mobile GPU Architecture Gains Traction 29
MojoKid writes "Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged but the top dog, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, Nvidia and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block — a company with a tiny, highly customized GPU, a number of recent design wins, and a strong product portfolio. Vivante got started in 2004 and started licensing its GPU designs in 2007. The company's early wins have been in Eastern markets, but this past year, it's begun to show up in devices intended for the West, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and Google's Chromecast. Vivante has taken a different approach to core design from most of the other companies that play in this space. All modern GPUs are explicitly designed to be modular and scalable. Typically what that means is that a company like Nvidia or AMD defines a single compute unit that can be duplicated throughout the GPU design. Vivante's GPUs are modular as well, but with a much finer level of granularity. Each of the three shaded blocks (3-D Pipeline, Vector Graphics Pipeline, 2-D Pipeline) can be segmented or stacked into various configurations. A GPU core, in other words, could contain more ultra-threaded shaders, or additional vector graphics engines, up to 32 cores in total. One of the advantages of this tiny, modular architecture is that you can clock the cores like gangbusters. According to Vivante, the 28nm high performance silicon variant of the Vivante architecture can clock up to 1GHz at full speed, but fall back to 1/64th of this in power saving mode, or roughly 16MHz."
Pay-for-Play PR on Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Vivante has been paying large sums for a major PR campaign all over the Internet. They PURCHASED a major article on the notorious Semiaccurate.com rumour site, for instance, and Slashdot is even worse at taking pay-offs, or pushing neo-con agendas.
The GPU IP arena is now pretty much wrapped up. First class mobile cores, with very weak AAA gaming performance, are available from Imagination (PowerVR) and Qualcomm (Adreno) with ARM (Mali) trailing somewhat behind, but always threatening to catch up.
In the large battery/mains powered arena, Intel is outspending every other GPU company combined, but making very little decent progress. AMD and Nvidia have the world's best GPU cores, and both are scaling their business up into 'super-computing' and down into ARM based mobile. Both AMD and Nvidia anticipate ARM conquering most of the desktop and laptop space, and have designs ready for these markets.
Where does a no-hopes like Vivante fit? Answer: they don't. Vivante just has venture-capital money available for self-promotion as the company follows the same pattern as the major losers in the PC hardware-graphics space. A couple of years back, and sh*tty ARM parts from promitive Chinese chip companies would use any old GPU IP, if it was cheap enough. When ARM grew up, and EVERYONE switched to killer ARM Cortex CPU designs, no-one wanted to use crappy GPUs anymore.
Allwinner, Rockchip and Mediatek make the ARM SoC parts that power every cheap mobile device, and they are either using Mali or PowerVR, with PowerVR looking like the big winner because Imagination is fighting for its life against AMD and Nvidia, and now needs to get as many customers as possible. With PowerVR GPU IP available to even the cheapest ARM chip companies, there is no room in the market for lesser players like Vivante.
Well, that isn't quite true. Vivante is banking on a complete collapse in the cost of low-end mobile devices (tablets, phones, etc), creating a need for ARM parts so cheap, that cannot afford to licence even the cheapest Mali or PowerVR cores, and so would go Vivante. However, this is a ludicrous fantasy. Both ARM and Imagination will reduce the licence fees for their older/simpler OpenGL ES2.0 cores to whatever level the market needs. Vivante's gimmick is that they will match the price, but offer OpenGl ES3.0 - a pointless tick-box feature in such underpowered hardware.
Those with a memory will recall the history of PC graphics companies. What happened to Hercules, Number-Nine, S3 and all the other giants of the early days? They followed the Vivante strategy of paying for good press, while new-comers like 3DFX, ATI and Nvidia actually built the future technology that PCs were very soon going to require.
With ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination, AMD (2014) and Nvidia, the ARM GPU market already has too many very good players. High end ARM devices are going to need the same AAA GPU performance only AMD and Nvidia can provide. PowerVR and Mali can now cover the really really low end. All five companies want to cover the middle. Companies like Vivante blew it long ago.