Tuesday, January 24th 2012
PowerVR Making a Comeback to PC as Discrete GPGPU, Real-Time Ray-Tracing in 2012
Remember PowerVR GPUs which last saw light when GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 were around? The company behind it, Imagination Technologies, is working on a discrete PCI-Express GPGPU card for workstations targeting the media industry, which provides real-time ray-tracing acceleration. After its exile from PC graphics, Imagination Technologies worked on and achieved prevalence in embedded GPUs, GPUs embedded into ARM System-on-chips (SoCs), found in smartphones and tablets. This kept its GPU IP and R&D more than afloat.
In 2011, the company acquired Caustic Graphics, a smaller and much newer startup, which was working on dedicated ray-tracing accelerators, and had come up with a working FCPGA chip. Together the company is in the final stages of preparing a product that will bring Imagination Technologies back to the PC, only this time as a GPGPU (such as NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FireStream), and not a display-GPU. The product will be backed by OpenRL Brazil 3.0 SDK. This product will launch some time in 2012.
Source:
VR-Zone
In 2011, the company acquired Caustic Graphics, a smaller and much newer startup, which was working on dedicated ray-tracing accelerators, and had come up with a working FCPGA chip. Together the company is in the final stages of preparing a product that will bring Imagination Technologies back to the PC, only this time as a GPGPU (such as NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FireStream), and not a display-GPU. The product will be backed by OpenRL Brazil 3.0 SDK. This product will launch some time in 2012.
16 Comments on PowerVR Making a Comeback to PC as Discrete GPGPU, Real-Time Ray-Tracing in 2012
Now where is Voodoo's real comeback?
Also just a matter of time before Nvidia absorbs the company ;).
And... there is definitely place in the market! They have all ancient licenses to do so... even Intel uses a powerVR core in its IGPs...
We should wait for Matrox to return also some day from its medical equipment field... it will happen as soon APU reign will gain strong and low and mid-entry end cards will be obsolete... and makers will start making only flagships... it must happen...
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If PowerVR comes back, then yay! But they gotta have competitive products and a solid roadmap in place for products coming after the initial launch. Last company I remember that tried for the 3rd player spot, released in the midrange segment then never released anything after that. Wasn't bad tech, they just lacked any staying power.