14 DAY TRIAL // Many of you may not remember the days of the PowerVR Kyro and Kyro II cards. These GPUs were made by French semiconductor specialist STMicro and were designed by today’s well-known Imagination Technologies.
The novelty of PowerVR’s architecture was the fact that the design was concentrating on a specific method of achieving high performance, and that was tile-based rendering.
The trick in tile-based rendering was to identify exactly what the user is seeing and not render any of the objects that are behind the visible objects in the 3D scene.
GPUs at the time were rendering the whole scene, together with the objects that were not visible to the user, as they were placed behind other entities or surfaces.
Today’s GPUs still do this, but various tile-based methods are used by AMD and Nvidia to improve efficiency.
Although it offered very competitive products, Imagination Technologies decided to withdraw from the computer GPU market and concentrate on the mobile GPU instead.
The move was very sudden and difficult to understand for PowerVR enthusiasts, as the products were competitively priced and offered good performance right along with the top players at the time like ATi, Nvidia and 3dfx.
Imagination Technologies took ARM’s example and instead of becoming a fabless chip designer like AMD, Nvidia or Qualcomm, it is actually licensing the technologies they are developing.
The PowerVR line of tile-based mobile GPUs was very powerful and even Intel licensed their technology for use in their Medfield and Clover Field low-power processors.
In fact, PowerVR GPU cores are so popular that they reportedly now own 78% of the mobile GPU market, while ARM’s MALI cores and Qualcomm’s Adreno (originally ATi Imageon), Nvidia’s mobile GeForce only are present in less than 20% of the powerful smartphones.
Imagination Technologies seems to be ruling the mobile GPU market and it is likely that their market share will only increase if we are to take this into account.
Once PowerVR Series6 gains more popularity, it’s not likely any of the other mobile GPU designers will catch up soon.
