6.9 GPU

The 3D graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerates 2-dimensional (2D) and 3-dimensional (3D) graphics and compute applications. It is based on the POWERVR® SGX544-MP2 core from Imagination Technologies. The SGX544-MP2 core is a multicore (dual-core) evolution of the POWERVR SGX544 GPU.

SGX is a new generation of programmable POWERVR graphics and video IP cores. The POWERVR SGX is a scalable architecture which efficiently processes a number of differing multimedia data types concurrently:

• Pixel Data
• Vertex Data
• General Purpose Processing

The dual core GPU splits geometry and pixel rendering among the cores to improve performance proportional to the number of cores.

GPU Features:

• Multicore GPU architecture:
  • 2 × SGX544 cores
  • Shared system level cache of 128 KiB (64 KiB per SGX-544 core)
• Tile-based deferred rendering architecture:
  • Reduces external bandwidth to SDRAM
• Universal Scalable Shader Engine (USSE™):
  • Multithreaded engine incorporating vertex and pixel shader functionality
  • Automatic load balancing of vertex and pixel processing tasks
• Present and texture load accelerator (PTLA):
  • Enables to move, rotate, twiddle, and scale texture surfaces
  • Supports RGB, ARGB, YUV4:2:2, and YUV4:2:0 surface formats
  • Supports bilinear upscale
  • Supports source color key
• Fully virtualized memory addressing for operating system (OS) in a unified memory architecture:
  • Memory management unit (MMU)
  • Up to 4-GiB virtual address space

For more information, see chapter 3D Graphics Accelerator of the Device TRM.