Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
takyon writes:
Imagination has announced new B-series GPU designs focused on automotive and high-performance computing use cases, as it has become difficult for the company to compete in the mobile GPU market:
It's almost been a year since Imagination had announced its brand-new A-series GPU IP, a release which at the time the company called its most important in 15 years. The new architecture indeed marked some significant updates to the company's GPU IP, promising major uplifts in performance and promises of great competitiveness. Since then, other than a slew of internal scandals, we've heard very little from the company - until today's announcement of the new next-generation of IP: the B-Series.
The new Imagination B-Series is an evolution of last year's A-Series GPU IP release, further iterating through microarchitectural improvements, but most importantly, scaling the architecture up to higher performance levels through a brand-new multi-GPU system, as well as the introduction of a new functional safety class of IP in the form of the BXS series.
[....] Imagination's current highest-end hardware implementation in the BXT series is the BXT 32-1024, and putting four of these together creates an MC4 GPU. In a high-performance implementation reaching up to 1.5GHz clock speeds, this configuration would offer up to 6TFLOPs of FP32 computing power. Whilst this isn't quite enough to catch up to Nvidia and AMD, it's a major leap for a third-party GPU IP provider that's been mostly active in the mobile space for the last 15 years.
[....] Beyond the addition of safety critical features on the BXS series, the automotive IP also features some specific enhancements in the microarchitecture that allows for better performance scaling for workloads that are more unique to the automotive space. One such aspect is geometry, where automotive vendors have the tendency to use absurd amounts of triangles. Imagination says they've tweaked their designs to cover these more demanding use-cases, and together with some MSAA specific optimisations they can reach up to a 60% greater performance for these automotive edge-cases, compared to the regular non-automotive IP.
Related: Imagination Technologies Group Up for Sale
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