LONDON — Imagination Technologies announced a new GPU core that supports hardware virtualization specifically for the automotive environment. The new PowerVR Series8XT GT8540 GPU, which can simultaneously drive up to six 4K screens with complex UIs at 60fps, supports the multiple, ultra-high resolution displays for cluster, head-up display (HUD) and infotainment that automotive manufactures are fitting to car interiors from 2018 onwards.
The company says it already has licensees for the core, though multiple 4k screens are probably between three and five years away.
"This might be a long way away, but silicon is being designed for these today," said Kristof Beets, Imagination's senior director of product management.
"A lot of GPUs are focused on the PC or mobile phone, and then they are re-badged for automotive," Beets said. "With this new core, we have developed it especially for the automotive environment, based on our proven solution for automotive.”
Beets said Imagination has been developing its virtualized solution for automotive over a number of years, so it is a proven market solution.
The new four-cluster PowerVR Series8XT features built-in hardware virtualization capability, enabling automotive OEMs to deliver secure, high-performance graphics capabilities for a vehicle’s many displays. PowerVR hardware virtualization can provide a complete separation of services and applications, ensuring they remain secure against system intrusion or data corruption. The platform can support up to eight applications or services running in separate containers at once and automotive OEMs can deploy and remove services at will without affecting others running at the same time.
Beets said the focus on virtualization is a key differentiator for Imagination's new core, with dynamic advance scheduling, flexible budgeting of resource for each VM (virtual machine) on the core, prioritization flexibility (for example guaranteeing the dashboard display), with near zero-impact on performance.
As more in-car infotainment systems move towards richer operating systems, such as Android which offer capabilities to run apps, the importance of a GPU capable of full hardware virtualization to contain rogue apps is of increasing importance. Allowing a rich graphical environment for the infotainment system, safe in the knowledge that the dashboard and other critical displays will be unaffected by malware with a single PowerVR GPU, enables higher levels of system integration, reducing costs, whilst maintaining the safety critical requirements of the design.
With enhanced design flexibility over the previous generation, the PowerVR four-cluster Series8XT enables automotive OEMs to design their systems to prioritise either graphics or compute-based applications. The Series8XT GT8540 can support long-running compute workloads on a single Shader Processing Unit (SPU) for ADAS functions such as lane departure warning, blind-spot detection, and surround view, amongst others. Other tasks, such as infotainment and cluster, can run on the second SPU, using prioritising mechanisms to reach system performance targets.
Dominique Bonte, a vice president and managing director at ABI Research, said the ability to run multiple workloads over each SPU is a game changer in the automotive industry.
"As the automotive industry moves closer to introducing Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous vehicles, powerful GPUs will be vital to power multiple high-resolution display," Bonte said. "With distraction concerns removed in driverless cars, additional opportunities for advanced infotainment features including 5G-based 4K video streaming will emerge in the longer term.
The PowerVR Series 8XT GT8540 is now available for licensing.
— Nitin Dahad is a European correspondent for EE Times.