Apple’s new A5 processor features a dual core PowerVR SGX 543 – the same graphics tech that’s set to be featured in the forthcoming Sony NGP, the difference being that the new PlayStation portable will double the core count, bringing an unprecedented amount of graphical power to the mobile space.
Firstly, where we are at right now…
Secondly, an interview which gives us some perspective on where we are going…
Two great resources for those of us that are excited about the future of mobile gaming.
“We are not building any more chipsets, we are building SoCs now. We are building Tegra SoCs, and so we are going to take integration to a new level. [...] The chipset business [has] not grown largely this year because we have not really been expanding the sales of it.”
I have been trying to wrap my head around these comments attributed to Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia. Ultimately SoCs, and a merge of OpenGL and OpenGL ES (at least in terms of API compatibility with stepped feature sets) is where we are heading. But I was quite surprised at how fast NVIDIA had come to this conclusion, when you consider they are in the business of shipping GPUs today, and not just R&D or licensing of the technology.
This article seems to illuminate NVIDIA’s strategy to some degree…
NVIDIA has spent the better part of a decade establishing itself as a major GPU player in everything from notebooks to workstations, but the imminent introduction of new products and technologies from competitors like Intel could detrimentally impact the company’s bottom line, particularly as these competing products transition to smaller process nodes and more advanced designs. Up until now, every CPU in existence had to be paired with a GPU that was either integrated into the motherboard or sold separately as a discrete solution; NVIDIA competes in both of these markets with its various integrated chipsets and discrete cards.
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If Intel successfully establishes itself as a major player in the discrete GPU market, both NVIDIA and AMD will be faced with an unwelcome third opponent with financial resources that dwarf the two of them combined. As the dominant company in both desktop and workstation graphics, NVIDIA literally has more to lose from such a confrontation, and it’s the only one of the three that does not possess an x86 license or an established CPU brand. This leaves the corporation at a distinct disadvantage compared to AMD; the latter can combine a CPU and GPU into a single package and / or design itself a graphics core based on the x86 architecture. With no simple way to address these issues, NVIDIA is exploring a separate market altogether, and that’s where Tegra comes in.
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The last twenty-five years are littered with examples of companies who claimed Intel (and, by extension, the x86 architecture) couldn’t possibly challenge the performance or scalability of their various processors or products. Faced with a future where integrated CPU / GPU hybrids chip away at its budget products and Larrabee challenges the midrange (at least), NVIDIA is pursuing the barely tapped market for smartbooks, UMPCs, MIDs, and next-generation smart phones. The company’s lack of an x86 license could prove to be a disadvantage, but the market space Tegra is targeting is the only one where a non-x86 architecture actually has a chance of succeeding.
Wars aren’t won by sitting at home and waiting for the enemy to come to you, especially when your foe has ten times your revenue and far-reaching connections. Graphics and GPU design will remain a critical part of the company’s future—you don’t pump two years into creating the concept of “visual computing” only to quit—but NVIDIA’s decision to capitalize on the on the same market opportunities Intel is working to create in Atom’s target market is, at the very least, strategically sound.
It’s pretty apparent right now that PowerVR SGX 540 still holds the lead, though the new 45 nm Qualcomms with Adreno 205 are a huge jump forwards from Adreno 200 performance wise. It’s interesting that it looks like we’re GPU or memory bandwidth bound on those new Qualcomms, as evidenced by the similar results the myTouch 4G and G2 post despite a 200 MHz CPU clock disparity.
When you note the results from the iPhone 3GS results against those of the iPhone 4 and the iPad (which all use the same GPU; the PowerVR SGX 535) it is clear that the size of the iPad’s screen and the iPhone 4′s Retina Display is killing fill rate. Reducing the benchmarked frame-rate by up to a third for newer iOS devices. This is something I touched on the moment we heard the specs of the iPad, and the iPhone 4.
Here is GLBenchmark 2.0 running on the Nexus S…