Imagination Announces The PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 GPU

[DMJC]

In car entertainment: AKA 2d video and a music player.... real gpu heavy stuff *rollseyes*

[schmidtbag]

I'm sure it will be fine if you don't plan to run Quake 3 or Doom 4 on your airplane cockpit.

I get your point, but think of it like this:
First, let's take cars into consideration, since I'm not sure what airplanes demand and the demands on car infotainment systems are increasing. When you look at the [slow] menus and graphics of current cars, they're usually all pretty basic 2D or pre-rendered stuff. Most cars use MIPS or low-end ARM processors, with little to no GPU acceleration at all. Fancier cars with fancier graphics run on something like a glorified Tegra TX1 chip, which is relatively cheap and abundant. A modern Tegra could easily handle the workload Imagination advertises if vehicles stick with the simple graphics they use now, except on higher-resolution displays. So, if they're not expecting 3D rendering or fancy graphics, why is this anything worth advertising? What are they offering that competitors don't?

As pointed out earlier, it seems Imagination's approach could have security issues, and it seems to be development options are limited. I just don't see what the advantage is going with them vs anyone else.

[artivision]

An old Snapdragon 820 with phones available for even less than 150 bucks, has 500gflops Gpu, two 6-instruction cores and two 2-instructions cores.

[andreano]

Everyone and their dog uses Mali

Basically. Here's some research to back that up: Copy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...U,_GPU,_memory into gpu.txt, then:

$ grep Adreno gpu.txt | wc -l
4
$ grep Broadcom gpu.txt | wc -l
6
$ grep PowerVR gpu.txt | wc -l
14
$ grep Vivante gpu.txt | wc -l
25
$ grep Mali gpu.txt | wc -l
84

Good to see that Vivante has some foothold though. They seem to be mostly used in Freescale's i.MX6 and i.MX8 SoCs, which are also aimed at automotive.

[HeadsUpHigh]

In car entertainment: AKA 2d video and a music player.... real gpu heavy stuff *rollseyes*

Have you ever seen what the brand new high end EV/Self driving cars look like inside? There is a lot of tech there and the current menus etc on more classic cars are severely lacking imo

[starshipeleven]

So, if they're not expecting 3D rendering or fancy graphics, why is this anything worth advertising? What are they offering that competitors don't?

As pointed out earlier, it seems Imagination's approach could have security issues, and it seems to be development options are limited. I just don't see what the advantage is going with them vs anyone else.

There is a reason Imagination Technologies is in deep shit after all. They are pushing what seems to be relatively expensive stuff on a market that does not really seem to need it. Stupidity is an acceptable theory here.

I mean NVIDIA at least pushes their Jetsons and things for smart cars or as "brains" more than GPUs (to help drive artificial intelligent systems of some kind, if not fully self-driving cars, which is something most manufacturers are currently doing atm and can't run on low-end embedded hardware).

[edwaleni]

Anyone who is interested in Imagination's Furian architecture, it can be found here:

https://www.imgtec.com/powervr/graphics/furian/

I think Apple will use up the current Rogue designs before dumping Imagination for their own design. Supposedly, Imagination thinks Apple has been poaching Furian architects on purpose to get their own graphics core. Imagination says they are looking forward to seeing Apple's new design, they seem pretty sure its a Furian rip off and will litigate it.

Apple is under the belief that Furian architecture came mostly from them and their work when pushing Imagination to get past Rogue.

[grok]

Well I have trouble figuring out why you'd want six displays in a car thus it's easier for me to imagine airplane instrumentation.
If there's too much eye-catching animated crap I think you would be more likely to get in a car crash! But computer vision will try to make the car stop so maybe it's a wash.

Regarding cars, I think they run "old" hardware. e.g. you buy a 2017 car, which first came out in 2014, with a SoC that came out in 2012 or 2011 or earlier - that's maybe optimistic, I expect some time consuming and "bureaucratic" dev process although we know or suspect they're cheaping out.

Security issues? You have security issues, no matter what. Malware escaping a VM is always a possibility (e.g. the java browser plug-in supposedly saved us from swiss cheese security of ActiveX or downloading random executables). But virtualized GPU may be good for something (both NV and AMD support it already but as a multi-thousand dollar feature as it's for Quadro and Fire Pro and such)
Meaning, security is a process not a product. Your car needs a really good software team running suitable processes and decades-long maintenance. I may agree indeed that running Android crapps next to vital systems may be a poor idea.

But the easiest explanation I can see is much of the announcement is a buzzword soup.

[starshipeleven]

Security issues? You have security issues, no matter what.

Wrong. The system running the car and the critical displays MUST be kept separate and ISOLATED from the outside world.

It's going to be coded like crap like any other closed-source embedded system so anything supposed to be secure will fail hard under inspection, but as long as it is not physically accessible without getting into the car and connecting to a debug port it will be secure enough for consumer use.

The media center system can do whatever, run Android and even be connected 24/7 to the internet with a 4G/LTE modem and it will be fine as long as it does NOT have direct access to the actual car hardware through CANbus.

I'd like to remember we already had a remote-exploitable car over the internet because some moron thought to integrate all in a single system to "save costs" or some shit, and the situation is still not anywhere near good. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-h...eration-hacks/

[chithanh]

Security issues? You have security issues, no matter what.

The number and severity of the security issues is a function of software design, processes and priorities.

Programmer mistakes (aka. bugs) per line of code you cannot control much, but you can control their security impact. If you do proper compartmentalization, then an issue can often be confined to one component. Other proactive security measures reduce the severity of bugs too. Here is some worthwhile reading, a discussion which ensued over the kernel hardening project which (among other things) ports grsecurity patches to mainline: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/21/244

The current problem in cars that can be pwned via Wifi? Earlier car generations hat a strict separation between the systems that control engine/brakes/steering/etc. and the IVI/entertainment system. This separation was abolished against the concerns of security experts which warned that exactly such a thing would happen. But no, car makers wanted to let people control suspension from the big touchscreen instead of placing extra buttons somewhere.