Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Announced publicly last June. Apple may have had it to play with even before then in the Apple labs. I don't know what kind of lead time Apple needs but they have used Intel CPUs that hadn't been publicly available in some products, so they push the envelope of new technology often.

Maybe if we look at the lead time Apple had with the current GPU in the A5, it would give us an insight IF we can expect Power VR series 6 GPU in the A6.

Anyone knows how long the press release of the current GPU in the A5 was annonced public, versus the shipping of the A5 ?
 
A 20x increase (the figure quoted in the article) over that at the same energy consumption doesn't sound reasonable, but let's suppose that happened. You'd arrive at 384 GFLOPs. That brings you up to the level of a flagship desktop GPU from 2007 (Geforce 8800) and (humorously) beyond Intel's current integrated offerings.

The question then is when is Apple going to start putting these in the MacBook Airs?
 
So if they're now catching up to 6-year-old console tech, we're talking about iPad 3 running BF3 at 720p30 on low settings.

Ballpark.

That's not bad for a handheld device...not earthshaking...but not bad...
 
I hate to argue with someone else from the Grand Rapids area but i have to disagree. Imo the iPhone is quite abit ahead of the DS or PSP in areas of mobile gaming, especially from a casual gamer aspect. Even hardcore gamers have plenty to keep them busy with first person shooters, grand theft auto, and plenty on the horizon. The only games the DS has to fall back on are the Mario, Zelda and Mario Kart games. Granted those are fantastic titles to fall back on, but without those 3 their platform is dead.

Yes, I agree (and I don't mean to start a Apple-kills-Nintendo argument). Casual gaming is much better on iOS, and there are a number of in-depth games on iOS too. I think games that sell (in largely identical fashion) on Android and iOS are the big future of mobile gaming.

Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc, are in a class of their own, though... I haven't bought a Nintendo device since the DS Lite, but to be honest, the only thing tempting me to consoles or handhelds ever is that there's Nintendo-franchise games I'm missing. :(
 
I hate to argue with someone else from the Grand Rapids area but i have to disagree. Imo the iPhone is quite abit ahead of the DS or PSP in areas of mobile gaming, especially from a casual gamer aspect. Even hardcore gamers have plenty to keep them busy with first person shooters, grand theft auto, and plenty on the horizon. The only games the DS has to fall back on are the Mario, Zelda and Mario Kart games. Granted those are fantastic titles to fall back on, but without those 3 their platform is dead.

You are a casual gamer.

Having "first person shooters" available does not make a platform loaded with good games.

Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc are best-in-class series for their genre. iOS does not have games of the same depth, production values, and quality.

It's like saying the PSP was a great movie platform and viable replacement for a DVD player for someone who likes action movies because it has "National Treasure" available.


There's a lot of neat indie stuff on iOS now, especially for casuals, but the vast majority of these are fairly short and shallow for someone looking for a deep, long game that just reeks of good design like the flagship Zelda games do.
 
I have no idea what they just said. Why don't they use layman's terms because 99% of the consumers are laymen.

They basically said nothing informative other than that it's going to be more powerful than previous generation chips. Well I already know that.
 
Sounds pretty good for the iPad 3 and it's doubled resolution.

The iPad 3 is supposedly coming out in 3 to 4 months, and already in production. How in the world could you think that they might be able to get a chip that's currently in prototype development stage into and iPad 3, or even iPad 4 for that matter? It will likely be well over a year before it will be ready for production.
 
waiting for realtime raytracing

Imagination Technologes purchased Caustic Graphics in 2010 for real time raytracing. It would be cool if this is standard functionality in future PowerVR architecture.
 
The iPad 3 is supposedly coming out in 3 to 4 months, and already in production. How in the world could you think that they might be able to get a chip that's currently in prototype development stage into and iPad 3, or even iPad 4 for that matter? It will likely be well over a year before it will be ready for production.
Maybe, but the press release from Imagination Technologies said that the chip had already "been delivered to multiple lead partners."
 
Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc are best-in-class series for their genre. iOS does not have games of the same depth, production values, and quality.

Mario is. Metroid was (when Retro Studios was at the helm). Zelda is... well it's the same game it's been for 10 years.

As for production quality, well Nintendo's got some catching up to do when it comes to iPhone games. Nintendo's portable (and non portable!) hardware can't compete with Apple's aggressive hardware releases, and the software juggernaut combo of the app store/android market will own portable gaming soon enough.

By the time the Wii U comes out, Nintendo will finally be capable of doing graphics on par with iPhone games that have been out for some time. And by then, Apple's next killer product(s) will continue to drain gamers' time.
6642215011_51376c1625_b.jpg



There's a lot of neat indie stuff on iOS now, especially for casuals, but the vast majority of these are fairly short and shallow for someone looking for a deep, long game that just reeks of good design like the flagship Zelda games do.

Your description works well to describe the Wii library. Most of it is shovel-ware waggle crap, with Nintendo being the exception (most of the time).
 
Last edited:
...A 20x increase (the figure quoted in the article) over that at the same energy consumption doesn't sound reasonable, but let's suppose that happened. You'd arrive at 384 GFLOPs. That brings you up to the level of a flagship desktop GPU from 2007 (Geforce 8800) and (humorously) beyond Intel's current integrated offerings.
But they also say it is "5x more efficient than previous generations" which COULD mean that at a given power consumption that it would ofter only about 5X the performance. Given that, the boost could match with the rumored resolution increase on the iPad 3.
 
Imagination Technologes purchased Caustic Graphics in 2010 for real time raytracing. It would be cool if this is standard functionality in future PowerVR architecture.

Won't happen in the next 5 years. Might not happen in the next 10 either. It's just too hard to justify using Ray Tracing in real time. A basic RT setup will get you reflections, refractions, hard shadows, and maybe funny shaped camera lenses. Do those effects matter that much? Certainly not enough to justify the huge engineering effort and performance hit they'll come with. And not when they can be faked pretty well with raster graphics in most cases. If you want more advanced effects like accurate depth-of-field, soft shadows, and global illumination you need to do distribution or monte-carlo ray tracing, which is so vastly expensive it won't even be possible with hardware acceleration. Rasterized graphics can fake this OK, and do it at a reasonable speed, so it's not likely that RT will make much sense in the next decade.

Ray Tracing does have the advantage that its cost is not very sensitive to geometric complexity. But its cost is very, very sensitive to the number of pixels and degree of anti-aliasing used. For that reason maybe RT will emerge as a real time method once we stop demanding higher and higher resolutions in our devices (because we've surpassed the eye already) and can no longer get improved image quality out of raster graphics.

Source: Me, I'm a Grad student in Computer Graphics.
 
Last edited:
A 20x increase (the figure quoted in the article) over that at the same energy consumption doesn't sound reasonable, but let's suppose that happened. You'd arrive at 384 GFLOPs. That brings you up to the level of a flagship desktop GPU from 2007 (Geforce 8800) and (humorously) beyond Intel's current integrated offerings.

No way! Intel showed the prowess of their Ivy Bridge chip playing a Direct-X 11 game at CES today (see here). It was awesome -- they did not want the game to go by too fast so they decided that instead of playing a live game on the Ivy Bridge (which would have been too fast and too much for the audience to handle) that they would instead make a video of somebody playing the game and then play it back on VNC instead.

Their Ivy Bridge chips must have awesome graphics!
:rolleyes:

PS: Intel graphics suck. So glad they patent-blocked the competition from delivering better graphics to us.
 
It's not really a stupid question. The current chip, the PowerVR SGX543MP2 was a huge step up from the previous generation (about 4x faster), putting every other mobile offering on the market to shame (the competition may have since caught up, I'm not sure). It's a chip capable of 19.2GFLOPs, which is on par with a Core 2 Duo (the Core 2, of course, being more flexible). It's also as fast as the Geforce 6800, NVidia's flagship GPU from 2004. Perhaps surprisingly, it's the PowerVR chip in this case that is more flexible.

A 20x increase (the figure quoted in the article) over that at the same energy consumption doesn't sound reasonable, but let's suppose that happened. You'd arrive at 384 GFLOPs. That brings you up to the level of a flagship desktop GPU from 2007 (Geforce 8800) and (humorously) beyond Intel's current integrated offerings.
From what the article says - although I'm not at all sure it's possible - the chips have 1/5th power consumption and 20x the power.
TheVerge said:
Imagination claims the sixth generation of its graphics core can deliver "20x or more" the performance of current-gen hardware, while also being five times more efficient.
So, technically, it means that they actually increased performance hundredfold for the same amount of power, which is insane.

They also claim potential performance up to 1000 GFLOPS (1 TFLOP), though it's probably well over the TDP of any mobile device.
TheVerge said:
The maximum computational performance is said to "reach the teraFLOPS range," though it's not entirely clear whether either of the particular core designs introduced today are capable of it.
 
How does this compare to Sandy Bridge gfx? After Intel's total FAIL in today's demo/lie of Ivy Bridge GPU performance (AKA a movie file they ran, pretending it was live video) maybe this is the path forward for MacBook Air gfx?

I missed this. Do you have a link?
 
Maybe, but the press release from Imagination Technologies said that the chip had already "been delivered to multiple lead partners."

PowerVR does not design or build discrete chips. Like ARM they create chip module designs (IP cores). Companies like Apple, TI, Samsung etc have to select the modules (CPU core, GPU, other stuff) and design + build the actual chip. This will take at least a year, more likely two years.

ARM Cortex15 design has been out for over a year now, and there still aren't any chips available with it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A15_MPCore#Implementations
 
But they also say it is "5x more efficient than previous generations" which COULD mean that at a given power consumption that it would ofter only about 5X the performance. Given that, the boost could match with the rumored resolution increase on the iPad 3.

That's true. If efficiency is defined as operations per joule, then 20x faster (operations per second) and 5x more efficient (operations per joule) would mean an increase in power consumption of 4x. This is why that 20x figure probably doesn't mean much -- we can't see that kind of increase without raising the power budget.
 
Totally. And with Retina displays, you don't need to spend cycles Aliasing pixels to make things look smooth.

You actually do. With the iPhone 4/iPod touch 4G display, aliasing artifacts are very clearly visible if you don't use anti-aliasing. Without anti-asliasing, it just doesn't look as good.

--Eric
 
PowerVR does not design or build discrete chips. Like ARM they create chip module designs (IP cores). Companies like Apple, TI, Samsung etc have to select the modules (CPU core, GPU, other stuff) and design + build the actual chip...[/url]
True, you made a point there (about discrete chips). However, the press release does say that "PowerVR Series6 has already...been delivered to multiple lead partners." So, it may be that it is just up to Apple to include it in their A6 SOC.

They pretty much have to use something better than the existing 2-core SGX543MP2 in the next iPad. Maybe that will be the 4-core variant of the current design (like in Sony's Vita) OR maybe it will be something based upon the PowerVR Series6.

----------

From what the article says - although I'm not at all sure it's possible - the chips have 1/5th power consumption and 20x the power.
So, technically, it means that they actually increased performance hundredfold for the same amount of power, which is insane...
They don't say 1/5th the power consumption at 20x the performance. They say that it is 5x more efficient, which could mean that it just offers 5X the performance at the same power levels (i.e. you shouldn't be multiplying those two numbers to suggest a 100x performance increase for the same amount of power).
 
Won't happen in the next 5 years. Might not happen in the next 10 either. It's just too hard to justify using Ray Tracing in real time. A basic RT setup will get you reflections, refractions, hard shadows, and maybe funny shaped camera lenses. Do those effects matter that much? Certainly not enough to justify the huge engineering effort and performance hit they'll come with. And not when they can be faked pretty well with raster graphics in most cases. If you want more advanced effects like accurate depth-of-field, soft shadows, and global illumination you need to do distribution or monte-carlo ray tracing, which is so vastly expensive it won't even be possible with hardware acceleration. Rasterized graphics can fake this OK, and do it at a reasonable speed, so it's not likely that RT will make much sense in the next decade.

Ray Tracing does have the advantage that its cost is not very sensitive to geometric complexity. But its cost is very, very sensitive to the number of pixels and degree of anti-aliasing used. For that reason maybe RT will emerge as a real time method once we stop demanding higher and higher resolutions in our devices (because we've surpassed the eye already) and can no longer get improved image quality out of raster graphics.

Source: Me, I'm a Grad student in Computer Graphics.

Thanks for the thorough expanation. Still, if ARM migrates to laptops, and it may for Apple, I would hold out hope that some level of ray tracing could be employed in future PoverVR implementations, even if not realtime.
 
To really take advantage of this one is going to have to have a LOT of fill rate to push effects to that many polygons. Can't wait to hear about the new bus architecture because they sure as hell won't launch it on the current one.
 
They don't say 1/5th the power consumption at 20x the performance. They say that it is 5x more efficient, which could mean that it just offers 5X the performance at the same power levels (i.e. you shouldn't be multiplying those two numbers to suggest a 100x performance increase for the same amount of power).

You are right. I made a mistake of multiplying those two variables. However, I don't understand what math you're doing to get "5x more efficient = 5x more performance".

Let us read the official statement:
Imagination announces first PowerVR Series6 GPU cores said:
..PowerVR Series6 GPUs can deliver 20x or more of the performance of current generation GPU cores targeting comparable markets. This is enabled by an architecture that is around 5x more efficient than previous generations.

Imagination announces first PowerVR Series6 GPU cores said:
PowerVR Series6 GPU cores are designed to offer computing performance exceeding 100GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS) and reaching the TFLOPS (teraFLOPS) range..
PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU (used in iPad 2) power: ~19 GFLOPS at 1x power consumption
PowerVR G6200 and G6400 GPU power: 100+ GFLOPS at 1/5x power consumption (or 5x performance at 1/5x power consumption);
...................................................... or
...................................................... 500+ GFLOPS at 1x power consumption (25x performance at 1x power consumption)
That's at least 25x of power over last gen chips.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.