Real World Technologies dissects Apple's A10 GPU
David Kanter over at Real World Technologies has released his ruminations on the GPU portion of Apple's latest A10 SoCs. Apple has licensed Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics IP since the earliest days of the iPhone and iPad. However, after comparing developer documentation from both Apple and Imagination Technologies, Kanter concluded that Apple has been slowly replacing off-the-shelf components of PowerVR GPUs with its own proprietary designs. He argues those components have been appearing in Apple SoCs since the A8 chip that powers the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Roughly speaking, Kanter describes a GPU as having three parts: fixed-function hardware, shader cores, and a software driver. The fixed-function hardware manages API commands and rasterization. The shader cores perform programmable graphics computation, and the driver translates API calls into ...