Imagination Announces New PowerVR Furian Architecture

[DocSwag]

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11186/imagination-announces-powervr-furian-gpu-architecture

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Taking place today is Imagination Technologies’ annual tech summit in Santa Clara, California. The company’s annual summit is always a venue for major Imagination news, and this year that’s particularly the case. As the cornerstone of this year’s summit, Imagination is announcing their next PowerVR GPU architecture: Furian.

Furian marks the first new GPU architecture out of Imagination in almost 7 years. Rogue, the company’s first unified shader architecture, was first announced in 2010 and has become the cornerstone of Imagination’s entire GPU lineup, from wearables to high-end devices. In the intervening years, Imagination has made a number of smaller updates and optmizations to the architecture, leading to the 6, 7, and 8 series of PowerVR GPU designs. Now the company is undertaking a more radical revision to their architecture in the form of Furian, which like Rogue before it, will ultimately become the cornerstone of their GPU families.

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Initially, Furian will co-exist alongside Rogue designs. The initial designs for Furian will be high-end designs, which means that Rogue will continue to cover customers’ needs for lower power and area efficient designs. In particular, the various XE designs will still be around for some time to come as Imagination’s leading design for area efficiency. XE will eventually be replaced by Furian, but this could potentially be some years down the line due to a mix of design priorities, cost, and the fact that new architecture features can hurt the area efficiency of a design.

 

The ultimate goal of Furian is of course to improve power and performance, both on an energy efficiency (perf-per-milliwatt) and area efficiency (perf-per-mm2) basis. In fact it’s interesting that despite the fact that the first Furian designs will be high-end designs, Imagination is still first and foremost promoting area efficiency with Furian. Compared to a similarly sized and clocked Series7XT Plus (Rogue), Imagination is stating that a Furian design would offer 35% better shader performance and 80% better fill rate (though the company’s presentation doesn’t make it clear if this is texel or pixel), with an ultimate performance gain of a rather incredible 70-90%.

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As for when we’ll see Furian designs in consumer hardware, that too is ultimately up to customers. Final Furian RTL designs will not be released to customers until sometime in the middle of this year, which is also why Imagination has not yet announced any specific GPU designs. As a result the lag time between announcement and implementation will be longer than past announcements, where the company was already announcing GPU designs with final RTL. Customers could potentially have Furian-equipped silicon ready towards the end of 2018 if they rush, but the bulk of the first-generation Furian products will likely be in 2019.

This is quite interesting. Imagination has been using the same architecture for a while now and now they're finally going to be moving to a new architecture. I'm curious as to exactly how much of a performance bump we'll be seeing. Apple has been using PowerVR for a very long time now as the GPU in their custom SOCs, so I'm guessing that the A13 SOCs could very well use Furian instead.

[randomhkkid]

Oooh it finally broke cover

 

TL;DR

* New GPU architecture since 'Rogue 6' (Apple A7 2013)

* Performance 70 - 90% higher than Rogue 7

* Higher efficiency and performance than Rogue 7 series

* Performance 70 - 90% higher than Rogue 7

* High ends part first (think Apple A series GPU designs)

* Architecture focused on scalability

[S w a t s o n]

Seems too close to Furion

[Orangeator]

5 hours ago, Swatson said:

Seems too close to Furion

I was thinking the same thing.

[tsk]

7 hours ago, Swatson said:

Seems too close to Furion

 

1 hour ago, Orangeator said:

I was thinking the same thing.

http://riddick.wikia.com/wiki/Furyans