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> Yes, AGX is a mobile GPU, designed for the iPhone. The M1 is a screaming fast desktop, but its unified memory and tiler GPU have roots in mobile phones. Powe
by VyseofArcadia 4y ago
> Yes, AGX is a mobile GPU, designed for the iPhone. The M1 is a screaming fast desktop, but its unified memory and tiler GPU have roots in mobile phones.
PowerVR has its roots in a desktop video card with somewhat limited release and impact. It really took off when it was used in the Sega Dreamcast home console and the Sega Naomi arcade board. It was only later that people put them in phones.
- robert_foss 4y agoBut being a Tiling rendering architecture which is normal for mobile applications and not how desktop GPUs are architectured, it would be fair to call it a mobile GPU.
- Veliladon 4y agoNvidia appears to be an immediate mode renderer to the user but has used a tiled rendering architecture under the hood since Maxwell.
- pushrax 4y agoAccording to the sources I've read, it uses a tiled rasterizing architecture but it's not deferred in the same way as typical mobile TBDR that bins all vertexes before starting rasterization, deferring all rasterization after all vertex generation, and flushing each tile to the framebuffer once. NV seems to rasterize vertexes in small batches (i.e. immediately) but buffers the rasterizer output on die in tiles. There can still be significant overlap between vertex generation and rasterization. Those tiles are flushed to the framebuffer, potentially before they are fully rendered, and potentially multiple times per draw call depending on the vertex ordering. They do some primitive reordering to try to avoid flushing as much, but it's not a full deferred architecture.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- monocasa 4y agoNvidia's is a tile-based immediate mode rasterizer. It's more a cache friendly immediate renderer than a TBDR.
- djmips 4y agoAnd Maxwell is used in the Nintendo Switch, I guess that makes it mobile! This is a mostly pointless debate.
- wazoox 4y agoUnified memory was introduced by SGI with the O2 workstation in 1996, then they used it again with their x86 workstations SGI 320 and 540 in 1999. So it was a workstation-class technology before being a mobile one :)
- andrekandre 4y agoeven the n64 had unified memory way back in 1995
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoN64 chip was also SGI designed
- djmips 4y agoThen that SGI team broke out to form ArtX, developed the GameCube hardware, then were snatched up by ATI and went on to form the foundation of ATI, now AMD GPUs
- nwallin 4y agoThe N64's unified memory model had a pretty big asterisk though. The system had only 4kB for textures out of 4MB of total RAM. And textures are what uses the most memory in a lot of games.
- klodolph 4y agoThat’s a somewhat misleading way to describe it. The N64 has 4K texture memory (TMEM), but you can use far more than 4K of texture during a frame—because you can load data into TMEM as many times as you like during a frame. In practice, you might think of TMEM like it’s a cache, it’s just that you have to manage this cache manually. You can use as much RAM as you like for textures. TMEM is also not part of main RAM, like the RSP’s DMEM and IMEM.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoWas it the kyro 2? I had one of these but killed it by overclocking... Would make for a good retro system.
- smcl 4y agoThe Kyro and Kyro 2 were a little after the Dreamcast.
- tomc1985 4y agoI actually had one of those cards! The only games I could get it to work with were Half-Life, glQuake, and Jedi Knight, and the bilinear texture filtering had some odd artifacting IIRC
- deaddodo 4y agoTo be fair, the architecture used in the early “desktop” variants was quite different from the modern mobile ones (MBX/SGX and beyond); excepting the TBDR.