4 ms·

iPhones also had a PowerVR GPU as part of A-series SoC. In iPhone 8/X (A11) it was replaced with Apple's own GPU design.

cromwellian 9y ago
That design isn’t custom but appears to be using PowerVR licenses IP given the way some press releases were worded. I find it highly unlikely Apple could design a market leading GPU compatible with their existing products in such a short time. Their CPU took a lot longer. My guess is the A11 is a tweak of the PVR and subsequent versions later will introduce a ground up redesign. PVR owns a lot of TBDR patent IP since they mostly went it alone on tiled based deferred renderers when most of their competitors were IMRs. It looked like a smart decision as desktop GPUs were hitting a memory bandwidth constrAint until GDDR and ultra wide buses started being used and GPUs got better at early-z rejection. But on mobile, TBDR works great since mobile has different power and heat constraints than desktop.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Funny thing is that my first 3D accelerator was a PowerVR, and unlike the 3Dfx solution it used the PCI bus to shuffle the finished frame to the video card for output.
- phire 9y ago
  I find it highly unlikely Apple could design a market leading GPU compatible with their existing products in such a short time. Nobody noticed, but apple started working back on their GPU all the way back on the iPhone 5s (with their A7 SoC) It wasn't a complete custom design, but it wasn't an off the shelf powervr either. Until that point, apple always released the exact model of GPU they were using in their SoC, then suddenly their documentation starts referring to "the apple A7 GPU" and "the apple A8 GPU". Wikipeida does give a model number for the GPU, but if you trace it back you find a andandtech article going through the logic speculating it must be a powervr 6 series. And all roads lead back to that speculation. For later SoCs, andandtech actually invent a new 6 core powervr variant, because powervr wasn't listing one yet die shots of the new iPad showed a 6 core GPU. With the release of the iPhone 5s, apple also switched from the powervr supplied driver to their own one written in house. It appears that apple incrementally swapped out parts of the powervr design until they arrived at the A11 SoC GPU which they declared as their own, with none of the original powervr parts remaining. Though the result appears to be very close to the original design. (I suspect powervr accidentally gave apple a perpetual patent license at some point before realizing what apple was up to) They didn't redesign the GPU overnight, it was designed and released incrementally over many years under our very noses. Nobody noticed.

cromwellian 9y ago

That design isn’t custom but appears to be using PowerVR licenses IP given the way some press releases were worded. I find it highly unlikely Apple could design a market leading GPU compatible with their existing products in such a short time. Their CPU took a lot longer. My guess is the A11 is a tweak of the PVR and subsequent versions later will introduce a ground up redesign. PVR owns a lot of TBDR patent IP since they mostly went it alone on tiled based deferred renderers when most of their competitors were IMRs. It looked like a smart decision as desktop GPUs were hitting a memory bandwidth constrAint until GDDR and ultra wide buses started being used and GPUs got better at early-z rejection. But on mobile, TBDR works great since mobile has different power and heat constraints than desktop.

digi_owl 9y ago
Funny thing is that my first 3D accelerator was a PowerVR, and unlike the 3Dfx solution it used the PCI bus to shuffle the finished frame to the video card for output.
phire 9y ago
I find it highly unlikely Apple could design a market leading GPU compatible with their existing products in such a short time. Nobody noticed, but apple started working back on their GPU all the way back on the iPhone 5s (with their A7 SoC) It wasn't a complete custom design, but it wasn't an off the shelf powervr either. Until that point, apple always released the exact model of GPU they were using in their SoC, then suddenly their documentation starts referring to "the apple A7 GPU" and "the apple A8 GPU". Wikipeida does give a model number for the GPU, but if you trace it back you find a andandtech article going through the logic speculating it must be a powervr 6 series. And all roads lead back to that speculation. For later SoCs, andandtech actually invent a new 6 core powervr variant, because powervr wasn't listing one yet die shots of the new iPad showed a 6 core GPU. With the release of the iPhone 5s, apple also switched from the powervr supplied driver to their own one written in house. It appears that apple incrementally swapped out parts of the powervr design until they arrived at the A11 SoC GPU which they declared as their own, with none of the original powervr parts remaining. Though the result appears to be very close to the original design. (I suspect powervr accidentally gave apple a perpetual patent license at some point before realizing what apple was up to) They didn't redesign the GPU overnight, it was designed and released incrementally over many years under our very noses. Nobody noticed.