Imagination Technologies has said that it is working on coherent interconnect technology; this would enable Imagination’s newest multicore MIPS processors to be combined with ‘large arrays’ of its PowerVR GPUs. The intent is to enable the company’s IP customers to create chips that would directly compete with Nvidia’s Kepler and Maxwell devices.
“As we go to multicore we have the option to increase the number of threads, the number of cores in a cluster up to six, and we can have multiple clusters so it gives you lots of dimensions to scale up the compute resources, and we are working on a fabric that can bring all this together. The interesting thing is you can connect together all these resources for extremely powerful compute clusters, and what we will be supporting is fully coherent operation between CPUs and GPUs. So multicore is not just about putting down multiple cores but multiple threads and not just in CPUs”, said EVP Jim Whittaker at the Multicore Challenge conference in Bristol recently.
