PerfDog and Imagination work together to help developers obtain key GPU data

Imagination explores the future and reality
Imagination Technologies has a history of nearly 30 years. The company is committed to creating semiconductor and software intellectual property (IP) to enable customers to gain sufficient advantages in the highly competitive global technology market. The company's graphics, computing, vision and artificial intelligence technologies can achieve outstanding PPA (power consumption, performance and area) indicators, strong security, fast time to market and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Products based on Imagination IP are used by billions of people around the world in their mobile phones, cars, homes and workplaces. Imagination is headquartered in the United Kingdom and China is headquartered in Shanghai. The company was 100% acquired by Kay Bridge Capital in 2017. At present, the company's share in the global automotive chip GPU IP market exceeds 45%, and its share in the global mobile GPU IP market exceeds 36%.

Imagination Corporation

DreamCast, PlayStation Vita, and iPhone familiar to gamers all use Imagination's intellectual property (IP). The company first launched a revolutionary new 3D graphics technology (now commonly referred to as graphics processing unit or GPU) in 1995. Since then, it has continuously developed new IP and licensed it to downstream world leading manufacturers. Other companies may start from desktop-based graphics solutions and gradually apply them to battery-type electronic devices, but Imagination's focus has always been to create the most energy-efficient solutions in the smallest possible area. This is why Imagination's graphics technology has supported the smartphone market from the very beginning, bringing games and entertainment into the hands of millions of people. Imagination's innovation continues to this day. The latest graphics IP is the IMG B series GPU, and its follow-up products will be available soon, and will bring cutting-edge ray tracing technology to the mobile field for the first time.

In addition, Imagination also said this year to re-enter the CPU market with a design based on the RISC-V Open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).

Imagination innovative technology enables more possibilities
In the GPU field, Imagination's accumulation of more than 30 years of GPU R&D experience and the pioneering spirit of always pursuing technological leadership are the reasons why this company is deeply recognized by the industry.

Its PowerVR GPU technology includes a wide range of multimedia IP from graphics, computing GPU to image and vision, and collects sensor or CPU data on the screen to provide excellent images for entertainment, user interface, etc. And the Power VR graphics processing unit (GPU) series is a market leader in terms of technical capabilities, roadmap breadth and ecosystem, setting a benchmark for mobile and embedded GPUs. PowerVR is the leading graphics technology because it is based on a complex and unique architecture. The efficiency achieved by PowerVR through the Block Delayed Rendering (TBDR) technology ensures the lowest bandwidth usage and the shortest processing cycle for each task, all of which ensure high performance and efficiency and the lowest power consumption per frame.

2018-2023 Global GPU Market Forecast

From November 2020, Apple has designed the desktop M1 chip using Imagination's GPU architecture. It is foreseeable that in the future, mobile GPUs will enter desktop applications and applications running on data center equipment will become a major trend. And in the next few years, with the gradual popularization of 5G, more and more computing will be migrated to the cloud. Therefore, it can be foreseen that the demand for computing power, especially GPU computing power, will increase at a very high rate in data centers.

PerfDog helps you interpret GPU data metrics
As an industry-leading quality service brand officially produced by Tencent Interactive Entertainment, Tencent's WeTest team has the same vision as Imagination on the road to pursuing high quality and high standards.

PerfDog is a professional performance optimization and improvement tool for all mobile platforms launched by WeTest to meet the needs of developers' performance shift testing. It began to be used by all teams within Tencent in July 2018. On the premise of maintaining the "easy-to-use" characteristics, after five major version iterations, in September 2021, the PerfDog6.0 version was fully commercialized.

In order to better guarantee the developer's high-quality R&D environment and product quality, in the latest version 6.0, PerfDog and Imagination cooperated to develop the basic information acquisition of PowerVR GPU (new full platform and full architecture 80+ GPU Counters), which is more accurate The detailed information will provide future developers with better access to key GPU parameters, discover, locate, and solve problems in a timely manner, laying a solid foundation for optimizing the performance upgrade experience.

Of course, the newly added GPU Counter this time is only a part, and there is more in-depth information that can be further explored in the future. And Imagination, as the industry leader in ray tracing technology, can work with PerfDog to provide developers with new technology optimization and improvement in the future.

WeTest & Imagination Developer Series Courses
—Overview of GPU and related technologies
In order to let more developers and practitioners learn about GPU and related technologies, and at the same time conduct better technical discussions and exchanges with everyone, WeTest & Imagination jointly launched a series of online public welfare courses for developers.

This series of courses includes: Overview of PowerVR architecture; PowerVR tools and SDK; 3d graphics; PowerVR performance recommendations; hardware-level ray tracing and other five topics and how to use PerfDog to interpret GPU indicator data. All those who are interested in this series can register for free to watch.

Course content:
● How to use PerfDog to interpret GPU data indicators.
● A brief overview of PowerVR hardware architecture and graphics rendering technology.
● Introduce PowerVR SDK and tools in detail.
● Explain in detail all important concepts in 3D graphics.
● A simplified version of the PowerVR Performance Recommendation Guide.
● Introduce Imagination ray tracing technology.

Instructors:
Teacher Seague Sheng
Senior Technical Consultant of Imagination China
Sheng Fangwei joined Imagination Technologies in 2013 and is responsible for managing the after-sales support of Imagination PowerVR IP licensing business. Before joining Imagination, he worked as a driver development MTS at AMD and was responsible for the development of OpenGL drivers. Sheng Fangwei holds a master's degree from Tsinghua University.

Public class information:
Course time: October 12, 2021
Participation: Identify the QR code or search the group number: 606330983 Join the QQ group to participate in the course.

About WeTest
Tencent WeTest is a one-stop quality open platform officially launched by Tencent. More than ten years of experience in quality management, dedicated to quality standard construction and product quality improvement. Tencent WeTest provides mobile developers with excellent R&D tools such as compatibility testing, cloud real machine, performance testing, security protection, etc., and provides solutions for more than 100 industries, covering the testing needs of products at various stages of R&D and operation, and has undergone thousands of products. . The gold medal expert team guarantees the quality of your products 360 degrees through 5 dimensions and 41 indicators.

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