PowerVR SGX Shader Cores

Imagination Technologies – a leader in silicon IP cores – debuts its PowerVRSGX Shader Graphics Accelerator family, the future of wireless mobile embeddedgraphics and video technology.

The PowerVR SGX cores for wireless applications are part of Imagination’sPowerVR Series5 scalable and fully programmable unified shader graphics andvideo core family, previously codenamed Eurasia. The first cores from thisfamily target mainstream and performance mobile graphics with state-of-the-artsupport for 2D and 3D and an industry leading feature set that exceeds OGL 2.0shader and Microsoft Vertex and Pixel Shader Model 3 requirements.

PowerVR SGX is available for licensing in three scaled variants (PowerVR SGX510,SGX520, SGX530) with sizes ranging from less than 2mm2 to 8mm2 in 90nmtechnology. These variants will enable a wide range of mobile devices from basicphones and entry-level feature phones to mainstream feature phones and advancedfeature and smart phones.

“Despite its very small size PowerVR SGX will set a tough benchmark that anycompetitors will have to stretch to compare with and, with advancedprogrammability and state-of-the-art shader features, will enable contentdevelopers to create a distinct new generation of mobile games andapplications,” says Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination Technologies.

PowerVR SGX enables the highest performance, most efficient and lowest powerconsumption solution for handheld 3D graphics and video. Each scalable PowerVRSGX variant provides highly flexible support for video codecs with zero siliconoverhead, using the advanced programmability of the core.

PowerVR SGX builds on the architectural benefits found in Imagination’s PowerVRMBX family, which is already the de facto standard for mobile graphics withlicensees including six of the world’s top 10 semiconductor manufacturers. Thefirst PowerVR SGX deliverables will be available for shipping to lead partnersfrom next quarter.

The PowerVR SGX family will co-exist alongside PowerVR MBX, which is currentlyintegrated in a variety of devices including mobile handhelds, car navigationand entertainment systems.

PowerVR SGX510, SGX520 and SGX530 are compatible with content created forPowerVR MBX. PowerVR SGX is backwardly compatible with key features from thePowerVR MBX family like the vertex shader programs and 2 and 4-bit PVR-TC™texture compression. These compatibilities, and continued support for allexisting PowerVR extensions to OpenGL ES 1.1, allow comprehensive softwaresupport developed on the PowerVR MBX platform to be carried forward to PowerVRSGX.

The PowerVR SGX Difference
The new-generation PowerVR SGX offers all the advantages of PowerVR’s highlyefficient tile based architecture. Unlike traditional graphics solutions thatdemand expensive memory or very large silicon areas, PowerVR's unique, patentedtile-based rendering and deferred pixel shading architecture allows a very smallsilicon die to deliver higher performance and higher image quality, at lowerpower consumption, than competing technologies.

PowerVR SGX takes the PowerVR architecture to the next level with a unifiedscalable shader engine (USSE™), which combines vertex shader and pixel shaderfeatures in a single scalable processing unit, enabling mobile semiconductor anddevice manufacturers to plan a roadmap where PowerVR will continue to enable thebest performance in the most efficient architecture for the mobile industry.

Shader technology enables superior realism and advanced features when rendering3D objects and, by making 3D effects more programmable, gives freedom to contentdevelopers to create more visually compelling and unique games and applications.

Continues Yassaie: “With its PowerVR deferred pixel shading architecture thePowerVR SGX family has the lowest core and system power demands. It’s ideal forunified memory systems plus integrated CPU designs in mobile and cost sensitiveapplications. Couple that with wide standards compatibility, high scalabilityfrom a unified shader architecture, pipeline scalability from 1x to 8x andbeyond and video encode and decode for free, and you have a solution that isdemonstrably superior to any other offering on the market.


“With PowerVR SGX we expect to maintain our hard-won leadership position onsize, power and performance – and its scalability means it’s suitable for a widerange of end-user products. The specification says it all: this is the premierwireless graphics solution and will enable our partners to continue thereshaping of the mobile multimedia market they have already begun using ourtechnology.”

Says Dr. Jon Peddie, the leading market researcher in graphics: “The mobilephone is advancing in functionality at a 3X pace compared to the PC, and futurehigh-end phones will incorporate the OpenGL ES 2.0 API with shader capabilities,similar to features found on high-end PCs. Imagination Technologies, with designwins in most of the major handsets, continues its lead by being the first tointroduce a design with support for this new API and we expect this newtechnology to fuel the next wave in modern advanced mobile phones.”

Inside PowerVR SGX
The PowerVR SGX family features the USSE™ unified scalable shader engine, whichcombines vertex shader and pixel shader features in a single programmable andhighly scalable processing unit. Maximum gate utilisation is achieved by sharingthe unit for both vertex and pixel processing with optimal automatic loadbalancing of vertex and pixel throughput, which are often different fromapplication to application.

PowerVR SGX’s USSE supports advanced geometry and pixel processing capabilitiessuch as procedural geometry (e.g. higher order surfaces, data instancing, pathbased geometry, point-sprite expansion etc.) and textures, advanced per pixeland vertex lighting effects (e.g. parallax bump mapping, refraction andreflection etc). Further, the highly flexible nature of the USSE architectureallows this programmability to be applied to many other tasks such as othermultimedia related activities (e.g. physical modelling), flexible video andimage processing and many more. This unified approach to processing also has thebenefit of requiring a single unified programming model with one compiler,reducing hardware and software qualification time.

PowerVR SGX’s latency tolerant architecture provides geometry processing andrasterisation decoupled to achieve minimal stalling as well as no pixel shadingof non-visible pixels and on-chip support for multiple render targets (MRT). Alarge proportion of PowerVR SGX’s peak throughput is achievable in realapplications and the architecture has the lowest bandwidth requirements asPowerVR SGX’s deferred pixel shading gives 2x - 3x fill rate compared to othersolutions at the same bandwidth. Across the wireless PowerVR SGX family partseffective fillrate performance is from 200Mpix/sec to 1200Mpix/sec @ 200MHz(with even higher Z and stencil rates) and polygon throughput is from 2Mpoly/secto 13.5Mpoly/sec @ 200Mhz.

Z and Stencil tests are performed on-chip requiring no external stencil orZ-buffer memory or bandwidth. Pixel shading and blending are also performedon-chip and compressed texture support is just part of an industry leadingfeature set which also supports OpenGL ES 2.0, OGL 2.0 and Microsoft ShaderModel 3.0 capable shaders, procedural geometry and MRTs.

PowerVR SGX enables compelling image quality via Internal True Colour™ -enabling colour operations to be performed on-chip using high precisionmathematics at arbitrary pixel colour precision up to 128bit/IEEE32 floatingpoint - combined with comprehensive programmable multi-sampling imageanti-aliasing for free.

A key benefit of PowerVR SGX’s tiling architecture is on-chip multiple rendertargets (MRT). This technology is unique to PowerVR tile based rendering andcannot be replicated by an immediate mode renderer (IMR) in a cost-effectivemanner. IMRs use conventional external MRTs with huge external memory storageand bandwidth. PowerVR’s on-chip MRTs result in low geometry processing with noadditional external memory cost and no additional memory bandwidth cost.

All major 2D operations are accelerated, including: BLTs, Alpha Blend BLTs, ROP2, 3 & 4s, lines and surface rotation.

PowerVR SGX fully supports the broadest range of mobile standards includingOpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.X, D3D Mobile, OpenVG, JSR184 and JSR239, DX9+ andOpen GL 2.0 APIs running under Linux, Symbian, WinCE and Windows Mobile OS.

Video For Free
Because of PowerVR SGX’s fully programmable architecture it can support videoacceleration for free, without increasing the size and complexity of the core.

Video is a core competence of handheld graphics processors and is increasingly amust-have feature, not just in Personal Media Player products, but also othermobile devices. PowerVR SGX provides outstanding image quality and frame rates,offloading video codec processing (including MPEG-4 and H.264) from the mainCPU. For video operations the host CPU load is minimal and the PowerVR SGX partcan perform motion estimation, motion compensation and transform, residualgeneration, transform, quantisation, inverse quantisation, inverse transform,image reconstruction, and deblocking (H.264), making it possible to efficientlyoff load the tasks associated with video compression/decompression from the hostCPU.

As well as enabling the playback of users own personal media content, PowerVRSGX’s advanced video capabilities will enable mobile services such asTV/video-on-demand and video messaging. PowerVR SGX also supports still imagestandards including JPEG and JPEG2000.