iPhone 3GS Has More Powerful PowerVR SGX 535 GPU?

[Hattig]

The PowerVR chips don't even have programmable shader pipelines, something that is required for openCL. They use tile based deferred rendering which is an entirely different rendering technique from what nvidia and ati use.

Hmm.

The POWERVR SGX family incorporates the revolutionary Universal Scalable Shader Engine (USSE™), with a feature set that exceeds the requirements of OpenGL 2.0 and Microsoft Shader Model 3, enabling 2D, 3D and general purpose (GP-GPU) processing in a single core.

API support includes OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL 2.0/3.0 and DirectX9/10.1
OS support includes Linux, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile/Vista/XP

The advanced vertex and pixel shading capabilities of the POWERVR SGX family

I guess some games (BoomBlox could be ported) could use the unified shaders to do physics calculations. Obviously as a mobile core it's a lot less powerful than a modern GPU, but in terms of actual technical capabilities it's better than anything Intel integrate into their chipsets.

 

[Aiphanes]

Look at this way...Does Palm have their own stand alone store? I was in a apple store yesterday in San Antonio and it was packed...

 

[deconstruct60]

Another, almost oddity, was with a question I had put to the Grand Central guys. They told me to ensure that I keep my coding complient with OpenCL. When I told them that I was developing for the iPhone and not the Mac itself, they basically said, Yeah I know, just make sure that you can be complient with multi-core devices when you need to introduce extra horsepower to your apps.

Errrr, what else would you expect the Grand Central guys to pitch? Code that "is compliant with multi-core " is Grand Central kind of code. It will be easier to deal with long term maintenance of your software program framework if it is designed from the outset to deal with concurrent threads/cores/etc. For example, factoring out the heavy computation stuff into a contain thread that conforms to OpenCL constraints (and don't have any implicit locks were running "single file" on single core won't expose concurrency problems. )


Trying to go back later and retrofit that into you program will be harder once there are lots of other dependencies and details also embedded into the program. If your program has no future 2-4 years from now then can blow off long term trends. It doesn't have to be "the next iPhone" or the "next iPhoneOS update", it is a longer term trend that devices will have multiple cores. If you have designed your application so that it can consume more concurrent recourses as they are available you app has more flexibility.

Some (or most ) of your app may not be up for OpenCL constraints. So the comments they were directing apply as applicable.

 

[chrmjenkins]

I was the one who commented on the report at AnandTech, and yes, it was one of the development team for the OpenGL|ES2.0 that I was talking to. He made really clear that it was the 535 processor.

Another, almost oddity, was with a question I had put to the Grand Central guys. They told me to ensure that I keep my coding complient with OpenCL. When I told them that I was developing for the iPhone and not the Mac itself, they basically said, Yeah I know, just make sure that you can be complient with multi-core devices when you need to introduce extra horsepower to your apps.

Does this mean that in a later minor update we'll see OpenCL being used with the current iPhone 3GS or, as I've heard rumor, a multi core main processor, allowing the iPhone to switch between cores, based on preference settings and/or CPU workload.

All looking very nice for the future of mobile devices.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm surprised they went all out for the 535.

 

[chickenninja]

535 minus 530 = 5 which less than 1% of 530. which means the palm pre is 99% effective at treating lack of iphone disorder.

 

[kallisti]

Am I the only one who is tired of constant iPhone news?

Yes, yes you are.

 

[DELLsFan]

Am I the only one who is tired of constant iPhone news?

No, no you're not.

 

[winterspan]

HOLY CRAP! The 535 is a beast!

As an example, the "Pandora" open source gaming machine (has like every emulator under the sun) uses TI's OMAP3430 like the Palm Pre, both of which use the SGX 530.

No wonder developers are getting 4-5x the framerate in heavy graphics sequences -- of course performance depends greatly on the specific scenes involved.

I'm telling you gamers right now.. Just wait until new high-end titles come out that use OpenGL 2.0 --- the iPhone 3GS is going to become a serious gaming machine. I'm sure 3rd party controller hardware that plugs in to the dock will also become popular with hardcore gamers.

 

[flurffmeister]

28 million polys, doesn't that bring it up to about par with the PSP's raw geometrical output?

(how many polys can you really fit onto 480x320?)

 

[dagamer34]

28 million polys, doesn't that bring it up to about par with the PSP's raw geometrical output?

(how many polys can you really fit onto 480x320?)

In theory perhaps, but the PSP has the benefit of a much larger battery. It's like saying you can get Xbox 360 quality graphics on the iPhone, but your battery will only last 10 minutes.

I do wish Apple would use some game like Super Monkey Ball to quote battery life for 3D games. They kill the battery faster than anything else.

 

[flurffmeister]

In theory perhaps, but the PSP has the benefit of a much larger battery. It's like saying you can get Xbox 360 quality graphics on the iPhone, but your battery will only last 10 minutes.

I do wish Apple would use some game like Super Monkey Ball to quote battery life for 3D games. They kill the battery faster than anything else.

I intend to test precisely that. (i.e. how much battery you're gonna get playing games)

I did it for the second-gen iPod touch and the videos are in my channel at YouTube, should be fun to see how the 3GS compares with the faster processor and graphics chip and twice the battery capacity.