LONDON — Mulitmedia processor technology licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc (Kings Langley, England) has announced it is delivering multiprocessing versions of its PowerVR SGX graphics intellectual property. The technology, henceforth PowerVR SGX543MP, is being delivered to customers in SGXMP2 (two-core) to SGXMP16 (16-core) variants, the company said.

Imagination's graphics IP cores now range from SGX520, the world's smallest OpenGL ES 2.0 mobile core, to SGX543MP16 for high-performance console and computing devices.

"With the ability to combine up to 16 SGX543 GP-GPU [general-purpose computation on graphics processing unit] cores on a single SoC, we are now able to deliver capabilities to our licensing partners previously only thought the domain of the discrete GPU chipset vendors, while maintaining our unrivalled power, area and bandwidth efficiency," said Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing at Imagination Technologies, in a statement.

Imagination claimed that its Series 5XT architecture scales in a linear fashion across all aspects of performance but specifically vertex shading, pixel shading, primitive setup and overall GP-GPU functionality, whilst maintaining full software compatibility and with virtually no overhead in bandwidth usage.

At 200-MHz core clock frequency an SGX543MP4 (four cores) delivers 133 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 4Gpixels per second Imagination said. Higher frequencies or a larger number of cores each deliver more performance. At 400-MHz core clock frequency an SGX543MP8 (eight cores) will deliver 532 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 16-Gpixels per second.

POWERVR SGX543MP includes dynamic load balancing and on-demand task allocation at the pipeline level enabling maximum processing power to be allocated to the areas of highest on-screen activity. The use of a single driver stack for all SGX cores means applications see a common SGX architecture via the standard APIs regardless of the number of cores used.

The main programmable processing unit within each SGX543 pipeline is the USSE2 (Universal Scalable Shader Engine2), has improved vector processing performance and overall throughput. This datapath upgrade is one of the key reasons why SGX543 delivers up to two times the performance for vector-heavy applications compared to earlier POWERVR SGX cores.

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Comment: more evidence shows that multicore just doesn't scale