Imagination Technologies PowerVR Rogue Architecture for Future iOS Devices Detailed

Earlier this year, Imagination Technologies announced its new PowerVR Rogue Series 6 and Series 6XT system-on-a-chip GPU architectures. AnandTech was able to examine these latest GPUs in detail, thanks to the willingness of Imagination Technologies to open up parts of its underlying architecture for the first time. Details on SoC GPUs are sparse, so this was an excellent opportunity to dive deep in the technology. AnandTech’s article is a technical discussion on how SoC GPUs and the Rogue PowerVR architecture operate. Imagination Technologies used this opportunity to describe its unique architecture and hows its choice to use the more efficient but less powerful 16bit Arithmetic Logic Units (FP16 ALUs) over FP32 (32bit) ALUs actually improves performance. Imagination is keen on not being seen as being left behind on core counts, and while we don’t expect the “core” terminology to go away any time soon, now that we have these low level Rogue architecture details, we can agree that Imagination does have a salient point as far as counting cores and ALUs is concerned. For the purposes of FP32 operations a Rogue USC is essentially equivalent to a 32 core design, with an ILP reliance similar to what we’re seeing out of NVIDIA right now, though perhaps greater than some other designs. Or as Imagination likes to compare it to, a 6 USC design would be equivalent to a 192 core design. Apple is an investor in GPU maker Imagination Technologies and has used PowerVR technology in all its iPhone models. These next generation GPUs are expected to land in future iPhone models, possibly even the iPhone 6. [Via MacRumors] Continue reading →

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