The Design and Demand Trend of Mobile Market GPU

The overall design direction of GPU is higher performance, lower power consumption as well as greater compatibility in unit area and size. Other trends including:

First: broadband demand. Laudick at ARM said “The increasing of resolution and content complexity has exceeded the pace of based memory technology and memory subsystem power consumption, which poses requirements for more innovation in GPU design, to help semiconductor manufacturers to achieve continuous performance breakthrough.”

Second: GPU computing. GPU will back more functions such as image processing, computational photography, gesture recognition; but only creating image. More innovative functionality will be seen, resulting in an open of a new mobile devices visual experience for consumers.

Third: closer collaboration between GPU and CPU as well as other processors. When GPU design adopts industry standard, and CPU uses ARM core, GPU compatibility between different vendors becomes difficult. This is the reason why Google advocate OPEN GL ES 3.0 standard in introducing Android 4.3. On one hand, it promotes more usage of GPU in system; and declines development difficulty by enabling game and application developer accessing GPU data with interface, on the other hand. In addition, industry standard OenCL and Andriod Renderscript API are also committed to achieve collaborative work between CPU, GPU, DSP and other processors through open interfaces and general programming language.

“Of future mobile devices, with OpenCL or Renderscript, CPU, GPU, DSP can better serve work, achieve hybrid computing, and share most work of CPU. If CPU, DSP and GPU are designed by manufacturers themselves, the implementation will be easier; but if comes from outside purchase, Difficulties exist,” said Bao Shanquan, Director of Product Marketing at Qualcomm.

There is no doubt, handset and tablet-based mobile markets represent the major revenue of GPU product, and becomes a huge driving force of current market development. Meanwhile, mobile computing is moving on, gradually changing market and users’ interaction with internet.