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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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