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

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

3. Bitboys

4. 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

5. 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

6. Why Mobile Graphics Acceleration?

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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)

10. Content Examples

11. Brief History of Mobile Graphics Acceleration

12. The Brief History
“Year 0” - No mobile graphics API standards available - Basically no market for mobile graphics hardware - Imagination introduces PowerVR MBX graphics processor
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
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
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!

13. 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

14. 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)

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

16. Mobile Graphics Hardware Vendors

17. 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

18. 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

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

20. The Future

21. 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
Close to 1 GHz in 2008 with the next ARM Cortex family CPUs

22. 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 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

23. 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

24. 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!

25. Demo Time!