It is fairly stunning to consider the fact of the semiconductor market. There are solely a handful of distributors in every market which can be related to most customers. Take GPUs for instance the place there’s solely Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. Solely the latter two have choices if you wish to play high-end video games, at the least for now.
China has been attempting to interrupt away from reliance on international expertise as a lot as potential, although. The nation has its personal home-grown CPUs, SoCs, reminiscence, and software program; the largest factor it is missing is GPUs. Innosilicon made some waves final 12 months with its Fenghua No. 1 GPU, also referred to as Fantasy One, however we didn’t hear a lot about it after the preliminary announcement.
Effectively, in a stay present yesterday, Innosilicon introduced the second-generation Fenghua GPU, predictably named the Fenghua No. 2. The place the unique half boasted grandiose specs together with as much as 32GB of GDDR6X reminiscence, the Fenghua No. 2 is a extra modest product with a smaller GPU and an emphasis on low-power operation.
Innosilicon lays down specs of 48 gigapixels per second fill price, 1.5 TFLOPs FP32 compute, and 12.5 TOPS for AI operations. In a vacuum, none of these specs are significantly spectacular in comparison with trendy GPUs from home design homes, however they turn out to be much more spectacular when you understand that we’re speaking a couple of GPU that apparently attracts energy within the 5W vary.
Two potential fashions of Innosilicon Fantasy Two graphics playing cards.
Some of the stunning claims concerning the Fenghua No. 1 was that it could have DirectX help to be used in Home windows. We by no means noticed that demonstrated, however Innosilicon is clearly far more assured within the second-generation half. The corporate demonstrated Home windows 11 on stage utilizing Unigine Heaven in DirectX 11 mode in addition to numerous OpenGL benchmarks together with CAD, AI processing, and various different game-like 3D exams.
The unique Fenghua GPU from Innosilicon was primarily based on PowerVR B-Collection expertise licensed from the UK’s Creativeness Applied sciences. We could not discover any point out of ImgTec in Innosilicon’s presentation, however PowerVR’s distinctive tile-based tech is completely fitted to tiny, super-efficient GPUs like this. We might be fairly stunned if this is not additionally PowerVR-based.
The Fantasy 1 by no means discovered its means out of China that we may see. That might be as a result of it had restricted manufacturing, or it may merely be that it was solely ever supposed for the Chinese language market. Hopefully the Fantasy 2 can discover its means abroad, as we might like to put this little graphics processor by its paces.
