Vivante technology—at the core of innovation
Vivante technology breaks through the limits of size, performance, and power to help customers deliver unique products quickly and cost-effectively. Our comprehensive—and growing—series of low-power, high-performance, silicon-efficient GPU cores ensure cutting-edge graphics quality previously only available on PC platforms.

The recent trend in graphics hardware has been to replace fixed functionality with programmability in areas that have grown exceedingly complex, such as vertex processing and fragment processing. The OpenGL® Shading Language was designed to allow application programmers to express the processing that occurs at those programmable points of the OpenGL pipeline. Independently compilable units written in this language are called shaders. A program is a set of shaders that are compiled and linked together.

Vivante’s GPU technology is architected from the ground up to deliver a high-precision, true unified shader implementation that maximizes graphics performance and quality per milliwatt of system power consumption.


Robust application support
Access to high-performance shaders without programming limitations is the key to lowering application development costs and developer support costs. Vivante’s high-performance true unified shader architecture delivers best-in-class programmability:

➢ Up to 43 billion floating point operations per second (GFLOPS) in the VX series of GPUs
➢ Full support for the OpenGL Shading Language without Appendix A exceptions
➢ High precision pipeline with support for long instructions
➢ Dynamic branching in the pixel shader and non-constant varying indexing


Smaller, cooler, faster
Vivante is the die size leader, offering the smallest OpenGL ES 2.0-compliant silicon footprint on the market. Fitting next-generation technology in the previous generation footprint, we enable full OpenGL ES 2.0 and 1.1 support in the same area as previous generation OpenGL ES 1.1-only GPU cores.

Vivante also offers the lowest power consumption (GFLOPS per milliwatt) GPU available today:

➢ Ultra low-power microarchitecture
➢ Frequency scaling
➢ Software-controllable power states

Because of our patented algorithms for reducing memory bandwidth and optimizing full-scene quality, Vivante GPUs also use less memory and processing power. Features like full-scene anti-aliasing, unified vertex and pixel shading, and rich texture mapping generate the highest quality graphics:

➢ Unified shader: 128 threads per shader unit, programmable aspect architecture
➢ Low-power techniques: extensive clock gating, flexible allocation of resources in the shader unit
➢ Patented anti-aliasing algorithm
➢ High-dynamic range textures


Scalability
Vivante’s shader uses a highly programmable multi-threaded architecture for scalability. Our modular software architecture supports multiple GPU cores with a single driver infrastructure.


Easy to integrate
With support for free-running AXI and AHB interfaces, customers can easily integrate our cores into their systems. Vivante’s licensees quickly and consistently reach target frequency and optimal final silicon area using provided reference implementation packages for Cadence and Synopsys design tool environments.