First DX10.1 silicon is unexpected

One of those products is SGX, a next generation 3D IP chip that marks coming of OpenGL ES 2.0 in silicon, optimised for OpenVG 1.1 and supporting Direct3D Mobile, 9L (Longhorn) and 10.1, industry's first announced part to do so.

OPowerpointless presentation with a twist... it has a point, incredible

Its features include fifth generation Tile Based Deferred Rendering, Universal Scalable Shader Engine - one word for scalable architecture (1-8 pipelines), Vertex, Pixel and Geometry Shaders. This was joined by programmable Anti-Aliasing, internal 32-bit IEEE FP unit(s), Parallax bump mapping and Shadow maps.

When it comes to both features and performance, here is the kicker. We're not talking about a desktop chip here, but a mobile chip spotting all the technologies we mentioned one paragraph up. And this very chip working at 100MHz scales quite well to 200MHz and beyond, offering a performance leap from two million triangles per second to 31 million. The pixel fill-rate also grew substantially, from 100 MPix/s to 1GPix/s. These numbers don't seem much for a desktop part, but in the world of handhelds, SoC combination spotting SGX chip could do wonders in the limited resolution spectrum (handhelds range between 320x240 and 800x400).

Sadly, since PowerVR guys were left out of manufacturing some years back, company had to go from fabless-semico to chipless-semico - that is to say, an IP company. Still, this did not stop the company from developing interesting concepts and going on their own way for the 3D scene processing.

The company has 400 employees with over 80% of engineering staff, so you can expect that such a compact organisation can address complex problems of 3D engineering and skip a lot of legacy talk, a usual thing with companies like ATI, Nvidia or Intel.

So, we won't be seeing a discrete PowerVR SGX part on the market, but rather the tiling GPU will be used by IGP/GPUs coming from Texas Instruments, Intel, Renesas, NEC and other unannounced partners. µ