A few weeks ago we told you about a graphics card created by Innosilicon under the name of Fenhua F1. Well, the commercial name at the end is Fantasy One and the Chinese company has just presented four different models of its graphics cards. All of them based on Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR BXT architecture. Will it be enough to stand up to AMD, Intel and NVIDIA?
The GPU shortage caused by COVID-19 on the one hand and the mining boom on the other has made graphics chips from both NVIDIA and AMD unavailable to many customers. This has led companies such as Innosilicon to bet on other solutions such as the adoption of other graphic architectures such as the Tile Renderers PowerVR from Imagination Technologies, which are designed for low-power devices.
In the present case, Innosilicon and Imagination have scaled the PowerVR BXT architecture to be used in a high bandwidth PCI Express graphics card with VRAM and have renamed it as Fantasy One to create an entire range in the style of which It has NVIDIA with its GeForce or AMD with its Radeon, of which it has physically presented four of them, but has given the specifications of only two.
This is the Innosilicon Fantasy One graphics cards
The first of the graphics cards that they have presented is the Innosilicon, it is a double fan model that they have dubbed Fantasy One Type A. Which can deliver a power of 5 TFLOPS in FP32 and a fill rate of 160 Gpixels. The GPU has a 128-bit interface with the VRAM, however, contrary to similar solutions from NVIDIA and AMD, the Chinese company has opted for the use of memory. GDDR6X to 19 Gbps which gives you a bandwidth of 304 GB / s.
The second graphics card within the range that they have presented is a model of triple fan, which uses a Dual GPU that takes advantage of the capabilities of the BXT architecture to mount the GPU composed of chiplets. So the specifications of the Fantasy One Type B they are twice as high as the previous model. That is to say, 10 TFLOPS of power, 320 Gpixels per second fill rate and 32GB GDDR6X memory. However, the VRAM is in X8 mode and therefore continues to use a 128-bit bus.
In principle these are graphics cards designed for cloud computing that will go to data centers and servers, this is demonstrated by the power capacity generate multiple video streams, until 32 simultaneous at Full HD resolution at 60 FPS each or 64 at 720p and 30 frames per second.
Based on the Imagination PowerVR BXT GPU
Innosilicon has confirmed what we told you about a few days ago and that is that its Fantasy One, formerly known as Fenhua F1, is based on the Imagination BXT architecture. In the diagram that has been seen during his presentation we can see a total of 9 cores per chip. Let’s not forget that it is an architecture designed to be composed of several chips or chiplets, what’s more, Innosilicon has dropped a model composed of 4 Fantasy One chips in its presentation.
According to the specifications of the BXT architecture, it is possible to achieve 6 TFLOPS in FP32 with 4 cores of it, but the Innosilicon design achieves 5 TFLOPS with 9. Which shows that it works at a very low clock speed. The reason for this is the fact that we are facing a GPU for servers that they have to work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week continuously. In any case, we expect a gaming variant of these cards, since we miss a PowerVR architecture on PC since the Kyro that appeared twenty years ago.
