multicore architecture of powervr - tvs | test and
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www.imgtec.com
Multicore Architecture of PowerVR
Bob Gardner, Developer Technology Engineer
24th September 2012
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Leading silicon, software & cloud IP supplier
Graphics, video, comms, processor, cloud
Licensing and royalty business model
Licensed to many top 20 semis & OEMs
Servicing high volume, high growth markets
Shipped by most major consumer brands
Smartphones, media players, tablets/netbooks, TVs/STBs, gaming
devices, radios, connected devices, dashboards/navigation
Strategic product division: PURE
Digital radio, internet connected audio (today)
IP business pathfinder, market maker
Established technology powerhouse Founded 1985; London FTSE 250 (IMG.L) Employees: 1,200+ UK HQ; operations world-wide Global customer base
Company Overview
UK Headquarters
R&D
Sales
Solution Centric IP
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If it’s the best, we’re probably in it
Approaching 1 billion products
powered by Imagination
Now more than 1m new devices per day
…around 11 per second
www.imgtec.com
PowerVR as a Multicore Processor
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What do we mean by Multicore?
Multicore is a loaded term
To some a core is an ALU, to some it’s a pipeline, to some it’s a chip.
In the end what we really want to talk about is parallel processing
…and PowerVR GPUs are massively parallelised.
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How does PowerVR Parallelise?
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We start with ALUs
ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Unit) run a single instruction set on multiple data sets
The building blocks of modern massively parallel processors
Immediate parallelisation
Basic building blocks of modern graphics
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Then we move to Pipes…and some very clever scheduling
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On Series 6 you can have more clusters
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All controlled by the Micro Kernel
Specialised control program running on the GPU
Allows the GPU and CPU to operate with minimal synchronisation
Lowers CPU load
Improves performance
Ensures maximum parallelisation
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Finally, we can multi-core
Unique architecture provides almost linear performance scaling
95%+ efficiency in typical performance conditions
Small fixed overhead in memory footprint
Increase <1% overall memory bandwidth per frame
Geometry processing load-balanced across cores
Each additional core allows another tile to be processed in parallel
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Imagination removes the complications
Regardless of the number of cores, clusters, pipes, or ALUs the developer sees a single system through the API and ‘Services’ layers
Our software architecture works to remove much of the complexity of multi-threaded programming
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Summary
GPUs are massive parallel processors
PowerVR GPUs have unique scaling advantages and can parallelise even further
Developers don’t need to worry about the number of ALUs, Pipes, Clusters, or Cores in a PowerVR GPU We do the worrying for you
www.imgtec.com
Questions?
www.imgtec.com
Multicore Architecture of PowerVR
Bob Gardner, Developer Technology Engineer
24th September 2012