iOS 4.3 Beta Hints at OpenCL-Capable SGX543 GPU in Future Devices

[KnightWRX]

ipad 2 will have either a 2048x1536 display(unlikely) or the current 1024x768

A 2048x1536 is a waste. It has far too high resolution and much less is needed for a retina display on an iPad. Around 1440 horizontal pixels is required at a 24" distance, and 1600 horizontal pixels at 18" on the 9.7" screen.

Remember folks, Retina display does not mean "a display with over 300 ppi". That is just silly. Retina has always meant "a display on which your eye cannot distinguish the individual pixels at the normal viewing distance".

For an iPhone, which is held 12" away from your eyes, that magic number is 300 pi. For an iPad, which is held farther away, it can be as low as 160 ppi. For your TV which is viewed from even farther away, 48 ppi is plenty for a "retina" display.

Read this boys before talking nonsense :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/

 

[cmaier]

A 2048x1536 is a waste. It has far too high resolution and much less is needed for a retina display on an iPad. Around 1440 horizontal pixels is required at a 24" distance, and 1600 horizontal pixels at 18" on the 9.7" screen.

Remember folks, Retina display does not mean "a display with over 300 ppi". That is just silly. Retina has always meant "a display on which your eye cannot distinguish the individual pixels at the normal viewing distance".

For an iPhone, which is held 12" away from your eyes, that magic number is 300 pi. For an iPad, which is held farther away, it can be as low as 160 ppi. For your TV which is viewed from even farther away, 48 ppi is plenty for a "retina" display.

Read this boys before talking nonsense :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/

Nice try, but no matter how many times people explain this, everyone ignores it.

 

[SandynJosh]

Let's be honest here, Apple totally screwed up, and lost out big time on the desktop games market. This games market pushed PC hardware forwards at an amazing rate and sold PC's at an amazing rate.

I think you overestimate the size of the PC gamer market. It was so small that the main supplier sold out and dedicated game consoles are where it's moved to.

However, the tablet market allows for one device to serve everyone, including the gamers, without special high-end, water-cooled graphics cards. This time around battery life is paramount for user satisfaction.

 

[mKTank]

I thank God everyday that you're a brilliant engineer who is well versed in displays, graphics processors, SoC's, and overall OS design. Otherwise, how would I know how awful Apple is at everything?

Stop being butthurt just because I'm right.

Apple never offer the highest-end hardware anymore.

 

[Chase R]

Stop being butthurt just because I'm right.

Apple never offer the highest-end hardware anymore.

To win, you don't have to be at the tip-top-cutting-edge of technology, it's all about end-user experience. Apple seems to be doing just fine selling their "inferior" products.

I'd rather have Apple use it's custom-taylored chips over a third party design such as Tegra 2 anyways. Better software-hardware integration.

 

[mKTank]

Well clearly the majority of people don't really care whether it's the tip-top-cutting-edge of technology. Apple seems to be doing just fine selling them.

I'd rather have Apple use it's custom-taylored chips over a third party design such as Tegra 2 anyways. Better software-hardware integration.

Lol, the 'A4' is just a Hummingbird anyway. I'm sure Apple could figure out how to optimize and get iOS running with Tegra 2.

Then again, seeing how rubbish iTunes is on Windows, maybe they couldn't.

 

[shartypants]

Wow, does this mean full Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will run? Hehe. Someday I imagine

 

[argor]

the SGX543MP4 in the psp2 and SGX543MP2 in iPhone5

 

[argor]

Microsoft would probably use Tegra technology over this relatively weak platform.

the powervr sgx540 in the omap4 is already faster than gpu core in the tegra 1 and 2
SGX5432MP parted with duals a9 that are in the iphone5
will totally blast tegra 2 away
as i see some one in this tread are asking about SGX545:
here is a slite comparison

SGX545:

4 Vec2 ALUs
2 TMUs
16 z/stencil
40M Tris/s
12.5mm2@65nm/200MHz

SGX543 2MP:

8 Vec4 ALUs
4 TMUs
32 z/stencil
70M Tris/s
16mm2@65nm/200MHz

 

[Chase R]

Lol, the 'A4' is just a Hummingbird anyway. I'm sure Apple could figure out how to optimize and get iOS running with Tegra 2.

Then again, seeing how rubbish iTunes is on Windows, maybe they couldn't.

What's in it for Apple to use Tegra 2?

And I could personally care less about the windows version of iTunes

 

[GnillGnoll]

Frankly, I fail to see how harnessing GPU power for consumer-oriented, general computing (not games, not scientific apps) would be of any use in today's app landscape. Please enlighten me!

Augmented reality, image processing and object recognition come to mind first.

A 2048x1536 is a waste. It has far too high resolution and much less is needed for a retina display on an iPad. Around 1440 horizontal pixels is required at a 24" distance, and 1600 horizontal pixels at 18" on the 9.7" screen.

There's something wrong with your numbers, the equivalent of 1440 pixels at 24" would be 1920 pixels at 18".
Apart from that, in normal use I frequently hold the iPad less than 18" away from my eyes.

Lol, the 'A4' is just a Hummingbird anyway.

A4 is a SoC. Hummingbird is the name of a CPU core. What are you trying to say?

 

[Jade velly]

We will ALWAYS have storage devices offline, they're very secure and no one can just 'hack' into them.

They will look about the same and have much more holding space (Our thumb drives would be able to hold tens of Gigs, if not TBs) and our compressing formats will be much more advanced, meaning we can put more in less.

 

[MattInOz]

A4 is a SoC. Hummingbird is the name of a CPU core. What are you trying to say?

I was of the understanding that hummingbird is a SoC and was one of the first to clock 1ghz on the A8 core thanks to the work of it's fabless designer intrinsity. Hummingbird is samsungs name for the chips they produce and sell. Intrinsity was brought up by Apple who had samsung produce the same chip for them under the A4 branding.

Which is why the A5 is likely as it'll be the first chip that Apple will have exclusive access to intrinsity optimization of the A9 core/s but they may have applied their bag of trick to the powerVR cores as well or the chip as a whole.

 

[GnillGnoll]

I was of the understanding that hummingbird is a SoC and was one of the first to clock 1ghz on the A8 core thanks to the work of it's fabless designer intrinsity. Hummingbird is samsungs name for the chips they produce and sell. Intrinsity was brought up by Apple who had samsung produce the same chip for them under the A4 branding.

Actually, Hummingbird is the name of the Intrinsity-optimized Cortex-A8 CPU core (see this press release). Samsung's main SoC using the Hummingbird core is called S5PC110. Apple's A4 shares the same CPU core and is manufactured by Samsung, but also has some quite different crucial components (e.g. different GPU, different video processor).

 

[iansilv]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

Anyone think this will make 3d angry birds possible?

 

[Rocketman]

When someone in the near future asks you if they should upgrade to iPhone 5 from X unit now, and several will, just tell them these tech specs:

The SGX543 is said to deliver performance of 35 million polygons per second and a filtrate of 1 billion pixels per second when running at 200 MHz, compared to 28 million polygons per second and a filtrate of 500 million pixels for the SGX535 running at the same clock speed. In addition, the SGX543 offers support for the Apple-backed OpenCL specification that allows applications to harness untapped potential of both CPUs and GPUs for processing purposes. Finally, the SGX543 support multi-core configurations allowing for even greater performance.

Then add that the hardware will also do a couple of trick features and will be cross-carrier compatible.

It will handle the new Apple Cloud product better as well.

Rocketman

 

[DeathChill]

Stop being butthurt just because I'm right.

Apple never offer the highest-end hardware anymore.

I don't know where you're getting butthurt from; I am literally laughing at you because you seem to think that you're an expert on both mobile hardware and software.

 

[mKTank]

I don't know where you're getting butthurt from; I am literally laughing at you because you seem to think that you're an expert on both mobile hardware and software.

Still crying?

 

[DeathChill]

Still crying?

I don't understand what you mean. I don't own Apple or Imagination Technologies stock so this doesn't change a thing for me.

I just have to laugh at your "expert" comments where you never back them up with any sources or information.

 

[nylonsteel]

I'm all for better gpu performance on aapl products
just wondering how much the new chip design group - that aapl bought about a year ago - is contributing to building more powerfull aapl products

 

[A Macbook Pro]

Could this help to power the iPad's new display resolution?

 

[chrmjenkins]

the powervr sgx540 in the omap4 is already faster than gpu core in the tegra 1 and 2
SGX5432MP parted with duals a9 that are in the iphone5
will totally blast tegra 2 away
as i see some one in this tread are asking about SGX545:
here is a slite comparison

SGX545:

4 Vec2 ALUs
2 TMUs
16 z/stencil
40M Tris/s
12.5mm2@65nm/200MHz

SGX543 2MP:

8 Vec4 ALUs
4 TMUs
32 z/stencil
70M Tris/s
16mm2@65nm/200MHz

1) what makes you think either the CPU or GPU will be dual core?

2) tegra 2 does 71 Mpolys/s if we're comparing theoreticals.

 

[argor]

1) what makes you think either the CPU or GPU will be dual core?

well it obvious that to stay competeded apple will need to have dual core a9
as selfones with SoC like omap4. MSM8960 will start coming out this year
and you also have to remember that apple soc refresh is 2 years
so apple need something that can stay compede for some time
so apple can give the soc a clock bump inn the ipone6 and still be one of the fastest selfones

and on the gpu one of the main reasons of getting a sgx543 is to be able to use it in a dual core configuration

2) tegra 2 does 71 Mpolys/s if we're comparing theoreticals.

well that wasent a theoreticals number there was a reason way I gave up the clock speed

 

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

Given Apple's previous choice of the SGX535, I too thought that the SGX545 is the next logical choice. These were both designed to fully target desktop graphics standards compared to their cohorts, DX9.0c and OpenGL 2.x in the case of the SGX535 and DX10.1 and OpenGL 3.x in the case of the SGX545 while the PowerVR SGX520, SGX530, SGX540, and SGX543XT were focused on OpenGL ES 2.0 which is a subset of OpenGL. Going with the SGX545 would have allowed Apple more flexibility in functionality since the additional desktop capabilities can be exposed through extensions in OpenGL ES. The SGX545 also supports the full desktop OpenCL profile whereas the SGX54XT3 only supports the embedded profile, which is again a subset of the desktop spec.

What the impact on overall power consumption be? I'm sure negative impact on battery life would be the number 1 worry.

 

[chrmjenkins]

well it obvious that to stay competeded apple will need to have dual core a9
as selfones with SoC like omap4. MSM8960 will start coming out this year
and you also have to remember that apple soc refresh is 2 years
so apple need something that can stay compede for some time
so apple can give the soc a clock bump inn the ipone6 and still be one of the fastest selfones

and on the gpu one of the main reasons of getting a sgx543 is to be able to use it in a dual core configuration

well that wasent a theoreticals number there was a reason way I gave up the clock speed

It's not obvious dual core is needed. I've yet to see any sort of benchmark or demo that a dual core has distinct advantages over a single core in smartphone environments.

Furthermore, the fact you supplied clock speeds doesn't make the number non-theoretical. It's a number based on ideal conditions which will never happen.