Safety architecture boosts automotive GPU for chiplets
Imagination Technologies has launched its latest automotive multicore GPU IP for chiplet designs with a new safety architecture.
The DXS is a scalable and flexible GPU IP designed by Imagination to process graphics and compute workloads in cockpit, infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems.
The design eliminates the overhead of achieving ASIL-B functional safety using a Distributed Safety Mechanisms that has a near-zero impact on GPU performance and minimal area cost, estimated at just 10%.
It does this by taking advantage of the inherent parallelism of today’s processors and the fact that no thread is ever fully utilised. A patented mechanism combines these threads into pairs and injects safety tests in idle moments to identify faults within the timeframe set by the ASIL standard.
This allows the DXS IP to achieve ASIL-B functional safety at a fraction of the Performance, Power or Area (PPA) overhead of the two main existing methods: dual-core lockstep, which increases silicon area by 100%, and workload repetition, which halves processor performance for safety workloads.
The GPU IP design also adds an additional FP16 pipeline and a set of new compute libraries and AI toolkits to achieve up to ten times higher performance for compute workloads compared to previous generations.
The Imagination DXS GPU supports the graphics and compute requirements of an entire vehicle line-up with single core configurations starting at 0.25 TFLOPS and scaling up to 1.5 TFLOPS – 50% higher peak performance than Imagination’s previous generation automotive GPU IP.
The multi-core technology allows for two, three and four core configurations, while the low bandwidth bus between cores and support for isolation makes the IP suitable for chiplets.
It adopts relevant features introduced into the PowerVR architecture in D-Series, such as Pipelined Data Masters and 2D Dual-Rate Texturing, to boost performance efficiency by 20% over previous generations of automotive GPU IP and ensure that it outperforms competitive cores on real world benchmarks.
“The GPU is no longer just used for graphics in cars,” says James Chapman, Chief Product Officer at Imagination. “The long-term nature of designing hardware in the era of the software-defined vehicles is making hardware designers choose flexible and programmable processors that can handle the AI workloads of today as well as adapt to whatever the future brings. Today, our automotive GPUs are as much in demand for their compute abilities as for their rendering.”
Developed alongside the hardware is a new set of compute libraries (imgBLAS, imgNN, imgFFT) to help software developers achieve up to 80% GPU utilisation. This will also accelerate common compute workloads such as computer vision and pre/post processing perception data for ADAS systems.
The libraries combine with new reference toolkits (oneAPI and TVM) to create a practical software stack based on open standards with which software developers can easily port their compute applications onto Imagination IP based hardware, and from there maximise their performance.
“PerfXLab Technologies develops heterogeneous computing software stacks and infrastructure solutions for companies looking to accelerate AI”, says Zhang Xianyi, Chief Executive Office at PerfXLab. “We are using Imagination’s compute software solutions to run various AI applications, including our LLM inference engine, PerfXLM, on Imagination GPUs and have so far achieved performance gains of up to 100% compared to the CPU, with minimal time spent porting.”
Imagination’s automotive GPUs support OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL and run popular automotive operating systems such as QNX and Green Hills Software’s INTEGRITY RTOS, as well as Linux and Android.
Hardware-based virtualisation enables Imagination GPUs to run up to eight operating systems simultaneously, with full memory isolation for fully secure GPU multitasking. Imagination partners with CoreAVI, the global leader in architecting and delivering safety critical graphics and compute software drivers and libraries, on the development of a safety critical driver, supporting OpenGL SC and Vulkan SC for Imagination GPUs.
“As vehicles become more autonomous, greater emphasis is placed on their ability to detect and handle faults in an appropriate manner,” says Dan Joncas, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer & Deputy CEO, CoreAVI. “By working with us, Imagination is able to meet the complex requirements of the automotive industry with a complete safety package covering both hardware and software.”
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