Mobile GPUs series is divided into 6 parts:

Mobile GPUs : Introduction & Challenges Mobile GPUs : Vendors Mobile GPUs : Architectures Mobile GPUs : Benchmarks Mobile GPUs : Pitfalls Mobile GPUs : Outlook

Dear Reader,

I am welcoming you to the second post of the Mobile-GPU blog series.

Today we are going to deal with GPU-Vendors in a brief alphabetic ordered overview.

ARM

ARM entered the mobile GPU market in year 2006, by acquiring a norwegian company called Falanx [1] – the acquisition happened shortly after the scandinavians found a licensee for their first Mali GPU.

The brits took the decision to start a GPU division quite seriously – the Mali Team got quickly integrated into the Media Processing Divion. The original Trondheim team got heavily extended and in the US, ARM did setup a R&D division led by graphics veteran Tom Olsen.

First drop was the Mali55 an OpenGL|ES 1.1 Core – next was an OpenGL|ES 2.0 Core named Mali200, followed by Mali400 and Mali400MP. Latest cores are Mali T-604/658 based on Midgard-Architecture, the feature-set is what you expect from Desktop Solutions, including DirectX 11 and OpenCL (full profile). Highlight for me is the support of ARM CoreLink Cache Coherent Interconnect technology, which enables sophisticated mobile GPGPU applications.

In general, most of the licensee of Mali Technology are located in Asia (Samsung – Galaxy S2 [5]), but you can also find the IP in the Thor Chipset of STE and even Intel is now a licensee. In terms of Sales & Marketing, I am sure that ARM benefits from the fact that the Cortex family is dominating the embedded CPU market.



DMP

I only have little details about this japanese company. All what I know is that Nintendo is using their GPU-IP-Core for the Nintendo 3DS [3], maybe for the Nintendo DS as well. The GPU within 3DS is in terms of feature-set between OpenGL|ES 1.1 and OpenGL|ES 2.0. It exists a kind of vertex shader, but no real pixel shader.



Imagem

A couple of years ago I did evaluate their Flash Lite solution on Altera FPGA, which seemed to be a solid peace of engineering work. In general this french company is focused on FPGA based graphic solution for industrial space. No signs in direction of more advanced 3D cores.



Imagination

The PowerVR Technology from Imagination is todays most successful GPU-IP. You can find PowerVR in all iOS-Devices from Apple, but also in chips from Intel (Atom), TI (OMAP) and many many more.

How did their start ? Some of us might remember that Sega-Dreamcast (1998) was equipped with a PowerVR MBX like GPU. Even though Dreamcast was not a big commercial hit, it is surely an important milestone of the PowerVR success story.

Based on a robust financial outlook due to the massive incoming royalty stream [2] and the most comprehensive IP Portfolio, it is fair to say that Imagination will be the GPU-IP-Leader for the next 2-3 of years.



logicBricks

It is a rather small company based in Croatia with offices in Germany and Japan. LogicBricks is offering simple 2D Blitengine but also OpenGL|ES 1.1 solution, mainly for Xilinx FPGAs. The OpenGl|ES 1.1 solution is basically a HW-Raster- and HW-Pixel-Pipeline unit, all the rest runs as SW on the CPU.



Nexus Chips

Based in Seoul and focused on GPU-Chip and GPU-IP selling. The portfolio includes OpenGL|ES 1.1/2.0, OpenVG 1.1 and quite interesting a dedicated Skia core.



Takumi

Another small GPU-IP vendor from Japan with focus on OpenVG and OpenGL|ES 1.1. It seems that Takumi was not able to extend their portfolio towards programmable solutions, so I doubt that they will stay in business for long.



TES-DST

TES-DST is more a general engineering service company then a focused IP Vendor. The IP Portfolio got stucked on OpenGL|ES 1.1, no evidence for a coming programmable solution, even though D/AVE 3D includes programmable shaders. Also a bit odd, the company is not longer member of Khronos Group. However, they have just released an advanced 2D Core which fits perfectly to niche markets like Industrial- or Medical-Devices.

Think Silicon

This greek GPU IP-Provider has a focus on very Low-End GPUs. Low-End in terms of SI-Area, power consumption but also feature-set. The current flagship IP is an OpenVG compliant core with less then 150K Gates. Beside that Think Silicon is part of LPGPU an EU-funded research project [4].



Vivante

Most likely number three GPU-IP Vendor, after Imagination and ARM. Originally founded by nVidia engineers with initial funding from Marvell. Very focused portfolio and strategy, strong customer base in Asia. Very cost effective development; Core Team in Silicon Valley and major workforce in China.

For me one of the most impressive success stories in the embedded GPU-IP business.



Movidius

Business focus of this irish company is on premium Video-Chip-Solution for mobile Devices. However, the list of company advisors named Ville Miettinen (former CTO of Hybrid Graphics). Due to the fact that their Myriad Architecture could handle GPU like requirements, I would not be surprised if an OpenGL|ES SW Stack might already exists.



nVidia

Well, I suppose I do not need to make many words about this leading GPU company. In the past years, nVidia invested quite a lot into scalable graphics technology to fit the requirements of high-end PCs and premium mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. The company is not longer just a GPU-Chip vendor, with the latest Tegra chips and by acquiring Icera [6] they become more and more a complete solution provider like Qualcomm.



Qualcomm

The shooting star under the Semis and one of the winners from the smartphone hype. It was a brilliant move from them to acquire the mobile graphics section of AMD, instead of licensing it from 3rd Party. The AMD-IP was ready to integrate and surely gave Qualcomm a big cost benefit. However, in the long run I suppose that Qualcomm will start to license 3rd Party GPU-IP, because the internal IP-Development can not keep up with the competition.



ZiiLABS

Formerly 3DLabs, are veterans in the GPU business. Today, ZiiLABS is focusing on chips specifically for the Android Tablet market. ZiiLABS has an In-House combined Video and Graphics IP Architecture called StemCell media processing array. For me such combined solution seems to be a very cost effective solution, in terms of SI-Area and total cost-of-ownership. According to ZiiLABS the solution is also OpenCL compliant.

And again, thanks for your time.

Bastian

[1] http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/13706.php

[2] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4236158/Imagination-technologies-to-see-big-royalty-uptick-

[3] http://wn.com/nintendo_3ds_n3ds_gpu_specs_features_especificaiones_departure_date_fecha_de_salida

[4] http://lpgpu.org/wp/

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II

[6] http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/customrel.do?easyirid=A0D622CE9F579F09&version=live&prid=753498&releasejsp=release_157&xhtml=true