Vivante Corporation

Last updated

Vivante Corporation
Founded2004;20 years ago (2004)
Headquarters,
Products Semiconductor intellectual property
Parent VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd.
Website verisilicon.com/en/IPPortfolio/VivanteGPUIP

Vivante Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China. The company was founded in 2004 as GiQuila and focused on the portable gaming market. The company's first product was a DirectX-compatible graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of playing PC games. In 2007, GiQuila changed its name to Vivante and shifted the direction of the company to the design and licensing of embedded graphics processing unit designs. The company licensed its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers, serving embedded computing markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment.

Contents

Vivante used to be named as a contributor to the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation. [1]

In 2015, VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. acquired Vivante Corporation in an all-stock transaction. [2]

Products

After its business pivot, Vivante developed a range of GPU cores that are compliant with the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 standards as well as the OpenVG standard. Created by VeriSilicon support for the Vulkan API 1.0 and for OpenVX 1.0 is provided for at least 6 major desktop and embedded operating systems. [3]

2D graphics products & Vector GPUs, summarized by the vendor under the term "Composition Processing Cores" (CPC), [4] sometimes mentioned with the feature of single pass composition blending capability of 8 or higher, are the GC300, [5] GC320, GC350 [6] and GP355 (OpenVG core [7] )with the additional listing of GC200 and GC420. [8] NXP further mentions GC255 in a presentation for their i.MX models. [9] The NXP i.MX8 series will come with 2 units of the GC7000Lite or GC7000 vector processor. [10] For 3D graphics products please see the table below.

Legend for the notes in below listing:

SeriesModelDateShader Cores
SP/Half (mode)
Silicon area (mm2)Core Clock
Max in MHz
Shader Clock
Max in MHz
Fillrate Bus width
(bit)
API (version)Shader GFLOPS
(High=SP / Medium=Half)
Usage
M triangles/sG vertices/s(GP/s)(GT/s) OpenGL ES OpenVG OpenCL OpenGL Direct3D
GCNanoGCNano Lite1 (VEC-4)0.3 @ 28 nm100–200

@ 28HPM

100–200

@ 28HPM

400.10.2N/A1.1N/AN/AN/A3.2?
GCNano1 (VEC-4)0.5 @ 28 nm200 @ 28HPM200 @ 28HPM400.10.22.03.2 [12] STM32MP157
GCNano Ultra
(Vega-Lite)
GCNano Ultra1 (VEC-4)1 @ 28 nm400 @ 28HPM800 @ 28HPM800.20.41.2

optional

6.4 NXP i.MX8M Mini
GCNano Ultra31 (VEC-4)1.6 @ 28 nm400 @ 28HPM800 @ 28HPM800.20.4?3.06.4?
GC200GC2000.57 @ 65 nm [13] 250 @ 65nmLP
375 @ 65nmG+
0.37532/16 Jz4760 [14]
GC400GC4001 (VEC-4)
4 (VEC-1)
1.4
2 @ 65 nm [15]
250 @ 65nmLP
375 @ 65nmG+
190.0940.18832/162.0 [16] 1.1 EP [16] 113 [16] NXP i.MX6 SoloX: GC400T
GC500 [17] 32/16PXA920: GC530
GC600GC6001 (VEC-4)
4 (VEC-1)
32/161.2/1.13.0/2.111 CuBox
GC800GC8001 (VEC-4)
4 (VEC-1)
2.5
3.38 @ 65 nm [18]
800 @ 28HPM
250 @ 65nmLP
375 @ 65nmG+
1000 @ 28HPM38 @ 65nmG+0.188 @ 65nmG+0.375 @ 65nmG+32/163.0 [19] 1.2

optional

3.0/2.1118 / 16 [20] RK291x,
ATM7013, ATM7019
GC8601 (VEC-4)
4 (VEC-1)
 ? @ 65nm [21] 444350.332/163.0/2.111 Jz4770: GCW Zero NOVO7
GC8801 (VEC-4)
4 (VEC-1)
350.10.26632/163.0/2.1113.2 [22] NXP i.MX6 Solo and DualLite
GCx000GC1000
(Vega-Lite)
2 (VEC-4)
8 (VEC-1)
3.5
4.26 @ 65 nm [23]
800 @ 28HPM
500 @ 65nmLP
750 @ 65nmG+
1000 @ 28HPM123
58 @ 65nmG+
0.5
0.375 @ 65nmG+
0.8
0.75 @ 65nmG+
32/163.0/2.11116 ATM7029: GC1000+,
Marvell PXA986, [24]
PXA988, PXA1088 [14]
GC20004 (VEC-4)
16 (VEC-1)
6.9800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM26711.632/161.23.0/2.11132 NXP i.MX6 Dual and Quad
GC40008 (VEC-4)
32 (VEC-1)
12.4 [8] 800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM26721.683.0/2.11164 HiSilicon K3V2
Vega xXGC3000
(Vega 1X)
4/8 (VEC-4)
16/32 (VEC-1)
800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM26711.68/43.0/2.11132 / 64 [25] NXP S32V234 [26]
GC5000
(Vega 2X)
8/16 (VEC-4)
32/64 (VEC-1)
800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM26711.632/163.0/2.11164 / 128Marvell PXA1928 [27]
GC6000
(Vega 4X)
GC6400?
16/32 (VEC-4)
64/128 (VEC-1)
800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM53343.232/163.0/2.111128 / 256
GC7000
(Vega 8X)
[28]
GC7000 UltraLite
GC1500? [29]
8 Vega0.50.832/163.0/2.11116 / 32Marvell PXA1908 [30] NXP i.MX8M Nano [31]
GC7000 Lite
GC7000L?
16 Vega11.632/163.0/2.11132 / 64Marvel PXA1936 [29]
NXP i.MX 8QuadPlus
NXP i.MX 8Quad

NXP i.MX8M

GC700032 Vega800 @ 28HPM1000 @ 28HPM106726.43.232/163.0/2.11164 / 128 NXP i.MX 8QuadMax
GC720064 Vega46.432/163.0/2.111128 / 256
GC7400128 Vega812.832/163.0/2.111256 / 512
GC7600256 Vega1625.632/163.0/2.111512 / 1024
GC8000GC8000
SeriesModelDateShader Cores
SP/Half (mode)
Silicon area (mm2)Core Clock
Max in MHz
Shader Clock
Max in MHz
Fillrate Bus width
(bit)
API (version)Shader GFLOPS
(High=SP / Medium=Half)
Usage
M triangles/sG vertices/s(GP/s)(GT/s) OpenGL ES OpenVG OpenCL OpenGL Direct3D

Adoption

They have announced that as of 2009 they have at least fifteen licensees who have used their GPUs in twenty embedded designs. [32] Application processors using Vivante GPU technology:

GC8000 Series

After Vivante was sold to VeriSilicon the Arcturus GC8000 series was released by VeriSilicon, which supports newer technologies such as OpenCL 3.0, OpenVX 1.2, OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenGL 4.0 and Vulkan 1.1. [39]

Linux support

There are no plans on writing a new DRM/KMS driver kernel driver for the Vivante hardware, since Vivante previously put out their Linux kernel component under the GNU General Public License (GPL), instead of maintaining it as a proprietary blob. The free Gallium3D-style device driver etna_viv has surpassed Vivante's own proprietary user-space driver in some benchmarks. [40] It supports Vivante's product line of GC400 Series, GC800 Series, GC1000 Series, GC2000 Series, GC3000 Series, GC4000 Series, and GC7000lite. [41]

See also

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References

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