Mobile Graphics Acceleration: Past, Present and Future Petri Nordlund, Bitboys

Agenda Bitboys Why Mobile Graphics Acceleration? Brief History of Mobile Graphics Acceleration Mobile Graphics Hardware Vendors The Future Demos

Bitboys

Bitboys Fact Sheet Graphics hardware solutions company established in 1991 Offices in Espoo and Noormarkku, Finland Number of staff: 41 Privately owned by management and investors Cipio Partners (London, Munich) Pohjola (Finland) 4 smaller Finnish investors Financially stable, profitable and growing Turnover 2003: 2,9 (0,5) M eur Turnover 2004: 4,7 (1,6) M eur

Bitboys Products Bitboys G12 - OpenVG 1.0 vector graphics accelerator Bitboys G34 - OpenGL ES 1.1 3D graphics accelerator Bitboys G40 - OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics accelerator Bitboys products are licensed to semiconductor and mobile phone manufacturers as IP (Intellectual Property) cores Bitboys cores are integrated into the SoC (System-on-Chip) semiconductor products manufactured by the licensor of Bitboys technology

Why Mobile Graphics Acceleration?

Why Mobile Graphics Acceleration? By the end of this decade Mobile gaming becomes serious business Several new companies will enter the digital entertainment business Games have to look good and play slick Requires an integrated hardware graphics processor Given that an average mobile phone chipset already incorporates tens of IP cores, a graphics processor is relatively inexpensive addition On the other hand, already almost 10% of the silicon real-estate is reserved for graphics rendering 239 million PC graphics controller chips shipped in 2004 Eight suppliers Source: Jon Peddie Research 207 million mobile phones shipped by Nokia 2004 740 million mobile phones will be sold in 2005 worldwide

Why Mobile Graphics Acceleration? The need for graphics acceleration on mobile phones is driven by Need to differentiate Need to look good, anything visual sells Games need it, developers want it to create better content User interfaces need to be more responsive and easier to use All other computing platforms have it already Soon more graphics processors will be shipped on mobile phones than PCs In performance, mobile graphics hardware is five years behind PCs

2D, 3D and Vector Graphics The focus on PC graphics hardware is on 3D graphics On mobiles, 2D bitmap and vector graphics have even a stronger pull on the market Vector graphics Used for graphical user interfaces, games, applications and maps Vector graphics hardware is easy and cost-effective to integrate Provides content scalability and small content size Standardized APIs OpenVG 1.0 (low-level rendering API) SVG (file format) Flash Lite (from Macromedia)

Content Examples

Brief History of Mobile Graphics Acceleration

The Brief History 2002 - “Year 0” - No mobile graphics API standards available - Basically no market for mobile graphics hardware - Imagination introduces PowerVR MBX graphics processor 2003 - Khronos introduces the OpenGL ES 1.0 API - Bitboys introduces the G10 graphics processor - ATI and NVIDIA enter the handheld graphics processor market - First serious deals signed 2004 - Khronos introduces the OpenGL ES 1.1 API - Bitboys introduces the G34 and G40 graphics processors - All major semiconductor vendors and mobile phone manufactures include 3D graphics acceleration on their roadmaps 2005 - Khronos introduces the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which supports vertex and pixel shaders - Khronos introduces the OpenVG 1.0 for vector graphics rendering - Bitboys introduces the G12 graphics processor Incomplete, our view only Who is Khronos A lot of things have happened in the past three years!

Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME™ Microsoft Direct3D Mobile The API Standards OpenGL ES 1.1 Fixed-function (non-programmable) 3D graphics API An embedded subset of the OpenGL 1.5 standard OpenGL ES 2.0 Programmable 3D graphics API, vertex shaders and pixel shaders Includes OpenGL Shading Language (a subset) An embedded subset of the OpenGL 2.0 standard OpenGL ES EGL Interface between OpenVG/OpenGL ES APIs and the OS windowing system Similar to WGL in PC Windows environment OpenVG 1.0 Low-level API for 2D vector graphics Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME™ A retained and immediate mode 3D API for Java environment Microsoft Direct3D Mobile Part of Windows CE 5.0 Similar to Direct3D on PC Windows

Currently Available Devices Basically all devices with 3D graphics hardware accelerators have been introduced during the past two years Handheld gaming devices leading the pack Sony PSP (Sony proprietary) Gizmondo (NVIDIA GoForce 3D) A small selection of phones available Mitsubishi D504i (DoCoMo) LG SV360 (ATI Imageon) Samsung SPH-G1000 (Samsung 3D hardware?) PDAs Dell Axim X50v (Imagination MBX) Samsung SPH-M7000 (Imagination MBX)

Device Gallery Sony PSP Mitsubishi D504i LG SV360 Samsung SPH-G1000 Dell Axim X50v Samsung SPH-M7000

Mobile Graphics Hardware Vendors

Falanx Microsystems Norway Imagination Technologies UK The Players The major players are: ATI Canada Bitboys Finland Falanx Microsystems Norway Imagination Technologies UK Mitsubishi Japan NVIDIA US All companies of 3D graphics hardware IP for handheld devices ATI and NVIDIA also offer multimedia chips, with integrated 3D graphics hardware Mitsubishi: Z3D, up-to OpenGL ES 1.1 Toshiba T5G ARM’s role

Typical Features 2D graphics BitBlt, fill, raster operations Vector graphics Native vector graphics support or implementation over the 3D pipeline Polygon rasterization with anti-aliasing Texturing and gradients (linear and radial) 3D graphics Geometry processing in hardware Rasterization, supersample or multisample anti-aliasing Two textures / pixel Bilinear and trilinear texture filtering Texture decompression OpenGL ES 1.x pixel pipeline

Typical Performance Geometry performance 1-3M triangles/s Realistically 15-20k polygons/frame Pixel processing 1 pixel per clock cycle => 100-200M pixels/second Realistically 5 layers of pixels on QVGA/VGA resolution Available memory bandwidth and power consumption are the two biggest limiting factors

The Future

Displays and CPU Displays Expect to see QVGA resolution displays next year on many phone models Some gaming phones will use horizontal displays VGA resolution in 2008 CPU 300 MHz ARM CPUs in 2006 600 MHz ARM CPUs in 2007-2008 Close to 1 GHz in 2008 with the next ARM Cortex family CPUs

Mobile Graphics Hardware Still expecting a breakthrough in 2006 timeframe Several interesting product announcements made this year Expect graphics hardware in smartphones/gaming phones by the end of the next year Vector graphics acceleration will be widely adopted Will take until 2007-2008 for graphics hardware to find its way to the high-volume basic phones Expect full vertex and pixel shader support in 2007 with OpenGL ES 2.0 Expect robust performance

Battle over gaming platforms DoCoMo i-mode Nokia N-Gage Mobile Gaming Consolidation of: Gaming platforms Mobile game vendors Battle over gaming platforms DoCoMo i-mode Nokia N-Gage Qualcomm’s BREW Symbian OS Casual and branded games will generate the largest revenue Content delivery may no longer be an issue Handset vendors have recognized the problem and will provide solutions – WiFi, memory cards, … EA is buying companies left and right

User interfaces Vector graphics and 3D graphics user interfaces The main operating system GUI Application specific user interfaces Expect: Animated backgrounds Animated icons Transparent windows Customized skins 30FPS!

Demo Time!