Imagination Announces A-Series GPU Architecture: "Most Important Launch in 15 Years"
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2019 8:00 PM ESTPPA Projections - Significant, If Delivered
Moving on, the A-Series improvements don’t mean much if we can’t put them into context in the competitive landscape.
As mentioned in the introduction, Imagination seem aware of the current PPA deficit that GPU vendor IP offers versus custom designs by more vertically integrated SoC vendors.
Starting off with a comparison between current generation Qualcomm GPU against an Arm GPU. Imagination didn’t specifically mention which designs we’re talking about here, but we do clearly see from the die shots that the SoCs being compared are the Snapdragon 855 and the Exynos 9820.
Here Imagination describes that for a similar performance level, Arm’s Mali GPUs are using ~184% the silicon area compared to Qualcomm’s Adreno implementation.
I do have some doubts about the validity of the comparison being made here, as these SoCs were not made on the same process node – Qualcomm's design is built on TSMC's denser 7nm process, while Samsung's Exynos uses their larger 8nm process. With that in mind, we take the metrics presented with a huge grain of salt as Imagination does say the figures are based on analysis of multiple Arm IP implementations rather than a single data-point.
Projecting the A-Series against a current Mali-G76 implementation, targeting a performance level equivalent to current generation flagship implementations (~100fps in Manhattan 3.0), an A-Series GPU would achieve a significantly smaller GPU implementation requiring much less die area. The comparison implementation here would be an AXT-16-512 implementation running at slightly lower than nominal clock and voltage (in order to match the performance).
If a customer were to choose to use more die area to go wider and slower in clock (more efficient), while still maintaining an estimated area that would be smaller than a Mali GPU, it would roughly achieve a 75% performance advantage. The comparison here would be an AXT-32-1024 running quite far below nominal, giving it a large power efficiency advantage.
Of course, Imagination’s comparison here were made against the current generation Qualcomm and Arm GPUs, which aren't what it'll actually be competing against. Instead, by the time A-series SoCs ship, it will be competing against the next-generation Adreno as well as Mali-G77. We know Arm’s promised goals for the G77 and the improvements in performance per mm² and performance perf/W is around 1.2-1.4x, which we could generalize to 1.3x. Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 990 only promises a 20% performance increase, which is slightly below this projection. On the Qualcomm side and the upcoming Adreno generation, we’ll have to wait a few more days to be able to talk about details, but generally we expect improvements in the same ballpark.
Fortunately for Imagination, the projected PPA figures and advantages for the A-Series are high enough that they would still be notably ahead of both Qualcomm and Arm’s upcoming next generation GPUs, keeping a comfortable lead in either GPU area, or performance, depending on the configuration.
So far everything looks quite splendid – what remains to be seen if Imagination and their licensees are able to deliver on the projected figures.
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RaduR - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Andrei Frumusanu was working for them . So maybe he has more info on how this is going to develop .The only downside for ImgTec is that they are depending on CPU vendors. So if they cannot sell this design to anyone ....
They tried with MIPS but for whatever reason MIPS lost traction . Most probably they wer eunable to sell the design .
Please understand that ImgTec is a very very small company that is fighting in fact with ARM . They are not Mediatek nor Qualcomm . In this market there is a lot of completion.
We have : Vivante in the lowend. Broad iMM has Videocore , ARM sells MALI together with Cortex designs. So how can ImgTec survive ?
I see the only option would have been MIPS + PowerVR or to be taken over by a company like Mediatek . I am still wondering why Intel did not buy them for the cheap or Mediatek .
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
I left back in November 2017 and avoided coverage till now due to any conflict of interest. The A-Series is beyond the horizon of future knowledge I had from back then so it was new to me, I don't have any more info beyond my estimates that I wrote.Vivante is effectively dead and so is the Videocore lineup, the best case scenario here is a 50/50 split with Arm. The CPU I thing I don't think it's a limitation as long as the GPU in fact does deliver on competitive PPA.
ZolaIII - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
I wouldn't exactly say Unisoc adoption of it would have a small impact (tho they are still recovering from bad Intel's influence) nor would I write of possibility of HiSilicone adoption (more so as they are keen on ARM for US ban compliance & after all Chinese IPO owns Imagination now). Actually this is going so far right now that RISC V foundation is moving out of US to neutral grounds to ensure that same fate that struck the ARM cannot happen to them.vladx - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
ARM is also planning to move remaining R&D centers from US to avoid any chance of US ban in the future.vladx - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Did anyone use Vivante designs in their SoCs in the past 3 years or so?GruenSein - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Uncertainties about ImgTech's claims and promises aside, I am wondering who is supposed to be the customer.Apple is developing their own GPUs now.
Samsung is going with AMD's RDNA.
Qualcomm has their Adreno GPU.
HiSilicon is using ARM's Mali.
I fear that this will be a very niche product unless it absolutely dominates all other solutions.
Raqia - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
If they remain independent, I think it'll be anyone who wants something better than Mali or Intel that don't have their own GPU or haven't partnered up, so with Intel also designing their own GPU cores I guess the main customer would be Mediatek, and a handful of other even smaller licensees like Broadcom for things like its Raspberry Pi SoC, NXP, STM etc.When compared to CPU designs which are becoming increasingly commoditized by ARM's freely licensed and very good SIP cores (with only nVidia and Apple doing their own custom cores in volume going forward), efficient GPU cores continue to be highly specialized and a well sought after technology. Imagination would also be a layup acquisition for any company besides Apple, AMD, or Qualcomm, so I could Intel, Samsung or ARM buying them in the future.
Raqia - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Also Marvell and other TV / automakers.name99 - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Amazon made a big deal about GPU support and AI inference in their Graviton 2 announcement. They might be an unexpected client?(For that to work, however, IMG might have to be more flexible in terms of being willing to scale up/drop functionality to match AMZ's needs. They were apparently unwilling to be that flexible for Apple... But hey, near death experience can sometimes teach...)
mode_13h - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
I'm sure Amazon is just talking about Nvidia and possibly AMD. Nvidia is officially supporting their software stack on ARM, and AMD's is opensource and could be recompiled for ARM (hey, it works on POWER!).