Chip design leader Imagination releases the latest GPU IP Tencent and NetEase will apply

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Titanium Media App News on January 13th, Imagination Technologies, the world’s fourth largest silicon chip IP (intellectual property) company, recently released a new scalable IMG DXT graphics processor (GPU) IP, which has a performance increase of 50% compared with the previous generation CXT, and the unit area The performance density is 20% higher and can be integrated in a system-on-chip SoC for mobile device chip markets such as mobile games with ray tracing capabilities.

Relevant persons in charge of OPPO, Tencent Games Photon Studio, Tencent Games Tianmei Studio Group, and Netease Games have indicated that they will use DXT GPU.

Ike, technical director of Imagination China, told Titanium Media App that with the continuous growth of the mobile game market, everyone needs to balance the market’s requirements for low power consumption and the desire for realistic and immersive images. The ray tracing technology of IMG DXT GPU can solve the refraction and reflection of lighting in 3D game scenes closer to real life. Compared with the previous real-time rendering ray tracing technology on high-end servers and desktops, Imagination now brings this technology to the mobile phone field.

“As a leader in high-efficiency mobile ray tracing, the company is accelerating the adoption of ray tracing and driving the development of the entire ecosystem. Now it has launched this mobile GPU and has licensed this IP to multiple fields,” David, Chief Marketing Officer, Imagination The company is also in talks with key partners in automotive, desktop and data center, Harold said.

It is reported that Imagination was established in 1985 and is headquartered in the UK. It is a global leader in semiconductor and software design. Its core has PowerVR GPU chip design IP technology for 3D, 2D graphics and high-performance GPU chips. The company was also an important supplier of Apple devices and was listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 1994. In 2016, the company had a turnover of £120 million.

Due to the importance of intellectual property rights to the chip industry, Imagination was privatized into a Chinese capital holding company. On September 22, 2017, the board of directors announced that it accepted the acquisition of Imagination by Chinese-backed Cambridge Bridge Capital (CBCP) for US$740 million.

Liu Guojun, vice president and general manager of Imagination China, told Titanium Media App that as of now , the company has more than 3,000 patents and applications, and the scope of silicon IP includes embedded GPU, CPU (central processing unit), AI acceleration and connectivity A one-stop solution to support heterogeneous computing. Ali Pingtouge, Tencent Games, NetEase Games, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Motorola, Perfect World, Unity and other domestic and foreign companies are using its technology to develop products and software applications.

The DXT released this time is mainly for mobile games, applying ray tracing technology to the mobile phone field. Its Photon architecture is currently the only ray tracing design that reaches the RTLS level 4, which can provide leading visual effects in an efficient manner, and The DXT workload is reduced by nearly 94% through Vulkan Fragment Shading Rate (FSR) technology, achieving the same power consumption and bandwidth savings, making the game experience smoother and more realistic.

The new DXT includes three series for mainstream machines, high-end machines, and flagship machines, providing different computing power and pixel filling power and optional RAC (instance) for ray tracing. Among them, the high-end version of DXT72-2304 RT3 GPU has a 50% increase in performance and computing power, up to 9TB of AI reasoning capability, supports the open source instruction set architecture RISC-V, and has functions such as configurability and scalability.

In terms of sales, Liu Guojun told Titanium Media App that currently IP is mainly sold to customers in the fields of smartphone chips, automotive chips (more than half of the market share), data centers, and desktop computer-level rendering. The annual growth rate of the entire company has reached 33% in the past two years, and the number of Chinese employees has increased by nearly 60%.

David Harold told Titanium Media App that Imagination found that compared with overseas markets, the Chinese market has significantly greater demand for GPU IP on the desktop and data center side, especially for high-performance product development, and Chinese chip design companies will use the company’s GPU IP It is a unique technological innovation to integrate RISC-V CPU into SoC.

Regarding the topic of a possible recession in the chip industry this year, Imagination said it has challenges, but it has little to do with chip IP sales, because chip IP is in the future sales model, and its customers are more likely to be affected by the down cycle, resulting in slower decision-making. But it will never stop.

Liu Guojun said that the entire semiconductor industry is cyclical, and the cycle is more reflected in the production of bulk semiconductors. At present, the demand for consumer products is obviously declining, but will the domestic market in the fields of automobiles, high-performance computing, and data centers be affected? , has little to do with the cycle, but has more to do with investment, innovation, and the next wave of market (potential).

In an interview with Titanium Media App, Liu Guojun emphasized that in recent years, Imagination has developed very rapidly in the domestic chip industry ecological construction and business growth. As a major provider of silicon IP, it will increase China’s ecological construction in the future , from the complete machine factory to the game factory, work closely with the entire industry, customers and partners and work with each other, hoping to provide the company with these core technologies and IP value positions, and be able to make due contributions to China’s semiconductor industry market . (Author｜Lin Zhijia)