Imagination looking to compete with NVIDIA HPC GPUs

EE Times reports Imagination Technologies is developing technology that would allow its IP customers to combine Imagination MIPS processors with large arrays of PowerVR graphics cores. The company explains they aren't going to spend all their time on creating a high-end chip like NVIDIA does, but instead they want to offer customers the option to get there via an alternative route. The Imagination cluster chip technology will support OpenCL and promises a very high level of scalability.

This would allow its IP customers to create chips that would compete directly with Nvidia’s Kepler and Maxwell chips for higher-performance computing.

Alongside its i6400 Warrior core, Imagination is developing the coherent interconnect technology to link hundreds of MIPS and PowerVR cores and is happy to support customers with such developments, said Jim Whittaker, executive vice president of the MIPS division, speaking at the recent Multicore Challenge conference in Bristol, UK.
The key difference is that Imagination is an IP supplier rather than a chip company, so it will support any chip customers that want to create a cluster chip. “Nvidia is a very different company, and we are not going to spend all our time on the high end, but if a customer wants to go there we are certainly able to help them,” he said.