Imagination Technologies has announced a new GPU design, the Furian which is the next step after the firm’s Rogue architecture, released in 2010, although that technology will continue to be available for lower level designs, with Furian being at the high end. The design has been built around an expectation of UltraHD resolutions. Imagination claims that for the same silicon space and clock parameters, the Furian boosts fill rate by 80% and shader performance by 35%. Imagination believes that 70% to 90% performance is possible. The primary ALU pipeline goes up from x16 pipelines to x32.
The architecture has been designed to be OpenCL 2.x compatible and the design is intended to allow users of the core to extend the design with new functional hardware, for example ray tracing.
As well as its traditional mobile device markets, Imagination is hoping to sell the core into automotive and VR applications. Features for VR include deadline support (with timewarp guaranteed at 60/90/120Hz) and high sustained performance at low power. There is support for 360 VR Video and native support for YUV at 8 or 10 bits.
The Furian will support 7nm processes and can support the Vulkan OpenVX and 120fps and HDR are supported.
