Before the start of IDF-SF 2013, Vivante invited BSN to discuss their about to be announced new GPU. Vivante may not be as widely recognized as the big name GPU manufacturers, but the company creates graphics IP which end up integrated in numerous SoC’s (System-on-a-Chip) for many end-user products. Their real claim to fame is they have one of the fastest small-form factor GPUs on the market as BSN showed last January.
The Vivante GPU IP is used by the likes of Freescale, Google?s Chromecast, Huawei, Marvell, and Samsung are just a few of their fifty licensees. Vivante mobile GPU IP speeds up the graphical displays of phones, tablets, TVs, automotive infotainment center consoles and dashboard displays. Vivante has the smallest licensable cores ? smallest die area and highest graphics performance per mm2 in every GPU class
Vivante has a full range of low power, area-efficient 3D products adaptable to a wide variety of platforms and consumer devices. They have a mobile GPU design for the low-end, with a tiny single shader stand-along 3D core, all the way up to a powerhouse multi-core multi-shader GPU that can deliver high performance 3D and GPGPU functionality for high-end tablets and smartphones.
The Vivante was founded in 2004 by a group of farsighted engineers and some willing investors. From its start up, the Vivante graphical IP architecture anticipated there will be changes in the marketplace because of users? higher and higher graphical expectations for their mobile devices. They started licensing GPU IP in 2007 and taped out their first physical GPU on a TSMC 90G process in 2006. That core is 3 mm² on TSMC?s 65LP process and passed OpenGL ES2.3 testing.
David Jordan, VP of Sales and Business Development, stressed the importance of how Vivante?s IP takes a much smaller area of the SoC die size than the competition. Even though they are only 3 mm² on a 40 nm process, they can exceed the performance of other GPU?s on a 28 nm process. Their design maximizes graphics and compute performance per die area for best-in-class mW per MHz.
Later this week, Vivante will introduce a new generation of graphical IP specifically designed to have an exponential increase in performance. BSN will follow up that announcement with an in-depth article.
