Re:Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement
by jordskott on Monday April 03, 2017 @07:21AM
(#14021973)
I already made a comment about Apple's GPU here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021814
Apple actually has its own mobile GPU, built from scratch.
The Tile-Based Deferred Rendering GPU is an advantage from the GPU sharing the same memory with the GPU. On a normal desktop GPU you need to transfer huge amounts of data from the main CPU RAM to the Video Ram but on a mobile device, the CPU and the GPU sit both on the same memory system. This allows you to architecture your GPU in a different way.
Both ARM's Mali and Qualcomm's Adreno use Tile-Based Deferred Rendering.
Re:Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement
by AlphaSite on Monday April 03, 2017 @11:21AM
(#14023405)
Both Nvidia and AMD have already switched or are moving towards tile based rendered to reduce bandwidth (and hence energy) costs.
Re:Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement
by monocasa on Monday April 03, 2017 @11:48AM
(#14023702)
Source? That's a huge architectural change for them.
Re:Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement
by monocasa on Monday April 03, 2017 @02:01PM
(#14025327)
So that's tile based rasterization not tile based rendering. There's a huge difference. This is basically just a cache before the ROPs write into DRAM.
EDIT: Also, I don't think his test is proving what he thinks it is.
Sounds like IMG has some fundamemtal IP that nVidia and AMD already license? They certainly have tied up their Tile-Based Deferred Rendering method, which never sounded that efficient to me (yet, Apple beats others graphically, so I probably don't appreciate it - maybe to do with cache efficiency?).
Apple, having understood this technique very well, might have thought of something even better.
They certainly would have to be pretty sure about their tech before sending this notification. Let's hope this... betrayal doesn't have the same fallout for customers as ~~google~~ maps did.