iPhone Secrets – Multi-GPU Future!?!

Too many years ago, a great company called 3dfx came up with the idea of having more than one GPU work on rendering images to your screen. Unfortunately, they were ahead of those days, and despite the fact they had the world at their feet, ended up by being engulfed by NVIDIA. Now, we may see multi-GPU technology on Apple's iPhone, and I think if this happens, those who will enjoy probably the most powerful handheld gaming console of the year will have to thank the "Voodoo spirit" for it...

The press release that made everyone go "WOW" is entitled "Imagination Technologies launches advanced, highly-efficient POWERVRâ„¢ SGX543MP multi-processor graphics IP family" and describes "the first POWERVR SGX graphics IP core with multi-processor (MP) core support" that comes in 2-core and 16-core variants.

According to Tony King-Smith, VP marketing Imagination Technologies, "The performance delivered by our latest POWERVR SGX543MP family is the ultimate statement of the highly linear scalability of our unique Series5XT architecture. With the ability to combine up to 16 SGX543 GP-GPU cores on a single SoC, we are now able to deliver capabilities to our licensing partners previously only thought the domain of the discrete GPU chipset vendors, while maintaining our unrivalled power, area and bandwidth efficiency." He may not say "we're going to send this to Apple for the iPhone 3.0 hardware revision," but that's what a lot of people expect to happen, anyway.

While it's obvious we won't have 16-core graphics on the iPhone 3.0, the capabilities of this solution are pretty impressive: "At 200MHz core frequency an SGX543MP4 (four cores) will deliver 133 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 4Gpixels/sec. Higher frequencies or a larger number of cores each deliver more performance. At 400MHz core frequency an SGX543MP8 (eight cores) will deliver 532 million polygons per second and fill rates in excess of 16Gpixels/sec."

While some expect the dual-chip solution to power the new iPhone, others claim this to be destined for the Apple Tablet PC we keep hearing about. To be honest, I'd go with the computer, and leave the phone as it is. Just think about the battery life - are we going to have a dual-GPU iPhone with 20 minutes 3D games autonomy? Thanks, but no, really.