Imagination Announces A-Series GPU Architecture: "Most Important Launch in 15 Years"
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2019 8:00 PM ESTHyperLane Technology
Another new addition to the A-Series GPU is Imagination's “HyperLane” technology, which promises to vastly expand the flexibility of the architecture in terms of multi-tasking as well as security. Imagination GPUs have had virtualization abilities for some time now, and this had given them an advantage in focus areas such as automotive designs.
The new HyperLane technology is said to be an extension to virtualization, going beyond it in terms of separation of tasks executed by a single GPU.
In your usual rendering flows, there are different kinds of “master” controllers each handling the dispatching of workloads to the GPU; geometry is handled by the geometry data master, pixel processing and shading by the 3D data master, 2D operations are handled by the 2D data, master, and compute workloads are processed by the, you guessed it, the compute data master.
In each of these processing flows various blocks of the GPU are active for a given task, while other blocks remain idle.
HyperLane technology is said to be able to enable full task concurrency of the GPU hardware, with multiple data masters being able to be active simultaneously, executing work dynamically across the GPU’s hardware resources. In essence, the whole GPU becomes multi-tasking capable, receiving different task submissions from up to 8 sources (hence 8 HyperLanes).
The new feature sounded to me like a hardware based scheduler for task submissions, although when I brought up this description the Imagination spokespeople were rather dismissive of the simplification, saying that HyperLanes go far deeper into the hardware architecture, with for example each HyperLane having being able to be configured with its own virtual memory space (or also sharing arbitrary memory spaces across hyperlanes).
Splitting GPU resources can happens on a block-level concurrently with other tasks, or also be shared in the time-domain with time-slices between HyperLanes. Priority can be given to HyperLanes, such as prioritizing graphics over a possible background AI task using the remaining free resources.
The security advantages of such a technology also seem advanced, with the company use-cases such as isolation for protected content and rights management.
An interesting application of the technology is the synergy it allows between an A-Series GPU and the company’s in-house neural network accelerator IP. It would be able to share AI workloads between the two IP blocks, with the GPU for example handling the more programmable layers of a model while still taking advantage of the NNA’s efficiency for the fixed function fully connected layer processing.
Three Dozen Other Microarchitectural Improvements
The A-Series comes with other numerous microarchitectural advancements that are said to be advantageous to the GPU IP.
One such existing feature is the integration of a small dedicated CPU (which we understand to be RISC-V based) acting as a firmware processor, handling GPU management tasks that in other architectures might be still be handled by drivers on the host system CPU. The firmware processor approach is said to achieve more performant and efficient handling of various housekeeping tasks such as debugging, data logging, GPIO handling and even DVFS algorithms. In contrast as an example, DVFS for Arm Mali GPUs for example is still handled by the kernel GPU driver on the host CPUs.
An interesting new development feature that is enabled by profiling the GPU’s hardware counters through the firmware processor is creating tile heatmaps of execution resources used. This seems relatively banal, but isn’t something that’s readily available for software developers and could be extremely useful in terms of quick debugging and optimizations of 3D workloads thanks to a more visual approach.
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s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
"Apple is the biggest example of what a toxic system capitalism can become. "Clear sign of a hater, vlad.
"Huawei is the biggest example of what a toxic system state capitalism-cum-corrupt monarchy can become. "
It could direct authorities to jail an individual for 251 days with false testimonies only to be proven innocent and compesated with a recording he kept, and those who lied under oath are never held accountable.
Huawei could frame somebody, to be jailed using the state apparatus supported by taxpayers, to be compensated using tax money when proven innocent, without expending a single cent from its pocket or giving so much as single apology when exposed. Yeah that's so much better than Apple.
Korguz - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
he's right apple does charge way to much for their products. all apple cares about.. is its profits....Threska - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Who isn't selfish? Companies care about profits. Consumers care about the lowest price.Korguz - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
not like apple does.. their stuff is very overpriced....s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004918/huawei-is-i...Everybody who has idealistic views of Huawei should be reading this, vlad accuses me of being a hater and look what he's doing.
s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
No shit that was 404'd.https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50658787
This is a BBC article but with much fewer details.
s.yu - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Key points here:1. Huawei's HR lead a few employees to lie under oath to start the investigation against him.
2. Authorities had the choice between detaining him and not detaining him, all they had to go on was Huawei's testimonies, they detained him siding with Huawei despite circumstantial evidence that the accusations were likely false.
3. He was investigated due to another false accusation from Huawei a few months in for an extension on his jail time.
4. Another employee was jailed under similar circumstances but gave in and wrote a confession under Huawei's promise no to press charges, which Huawei immediately seized, and brought to court.
5. He only discovered the reason to jail him when he met his lawyer appointed by his wife, which was already months into his effective sentence, only then did he disclose that he had a recording of his discussion with the company regarding compensations(and multiple backups, some of which survived police search during his arrest), which proved his innocence.
6. Upon procecutors terminating investigations on revelation from the recording and releasing him with compensation from the state, Huawei immediately modified their testimony.
7. There was never an apology nor compensation from Huawei for framing Li, not in an official capacity, not by the employees and the HR who gave the false testimonies, and the individuals who lied under oath were never prosecuted nor even investigated.
8. In the first 2-3 days of the incident there was intense censorship, to a scale probably unimaginable by an outsider, but as the Party realized this could not be suppressed, which brings us to where we are now. They turned to attempting to dictate the public discourse with censored reports and obfuscated details, and encouraging the spread of effectively irrelevant content defending Huawei from ideological and emotional standpoints.
ksec - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
That assumes the drivers from IMG or Vendors could make their GPU perform as fast as it could.mode_13h - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
Only because they refuse to open source (or publish details to support open source driver development).lucam - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link
Do not forget there is also the AXT-48-1536 for premium mobile that should go even faster than the 1024 and therefore easily compete with the future A14