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High Performance Graphics in a Consumer SoC: How to fit it into your system without squeezing everything else out
Peter McGuinness US Director of Business Development Imagination Technologies, Inc.
High performance graphics has gone mainstream in a range of embedded devices. Driven in large part by the fact that for a consumer, the user interface is the device and the primary user interface is visual, in less than a year the discussion has moved on from whether to include hardware acceleration to how much acceleration is needed to compete; whereas the level of graphics was previously defined by the limitations of the system, now the system is being redefined by the need to provide compelling graphical interfaces. Having been given the task of coming up with a graphics enabled device, the first problem the architect must confront is simply fitting the technology into the system: the driving forces in embedded design are still cost, power efficiency and simplicity, so how can a technology which has developed in an environment largely insulated from these forces be modified to meet these unchanging criteria? This talk will take a look at some of the ways in which performance-efficient techniques can also deliver power and bandwidth-efficiencies sufficient to minimize some of those problems. We will take a look at what sort of power efficiency improvements can be delivered by hardware and what can be expected in terms of bus and memory interface loadings from some typical graphical operations. Next, we will turn to the effect on firmware of adding a new accelerator into the system. With a simple CPU driven interface, the software task is manageable without the need for an extensive infrastructure but with the user expectation of fancy animated graphics which mixes in video and other multimedia, the need for a uniform framework of interoperable firmware becomes critical. The second theme of the talk will be to survey the standard APIs which make this possible, focusing on the open standard APIs managed and promoted by Khronos. Last but equally important, is the ecosystem of tools and applications available to OEMs which will allow them to differentiate and add value to the graphical platform you have given them. This, for the consumer, is where the rubber hits the road and the extra cost of graphics is repaid by the improved useability and functionality of the end device. We will take a look at the kind of tools you should expect from a graphics vendor, and we will survey content creation and management applications out there which will help to deliver that extra value.
About Peter McGuinness Peter McGuinness is US Director of Business Development at Imagination Technologies, Inc. a London Based company specialising in the development and licensing of hardware and software intellectual property for the mobile and consumer electronics markets. Since 1984 he has been involved in the design of graphics and video chips with Inmos, STMicroelectronics and Nvidia and has been well placed to observe the evolution of graphics adapters from standalone systems, able to call on dedicated resources and unlimited power budgets, to tightly integrated subsystems which are required to 'play nice' in resource constrained real-time multimedia SoCs.
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