Vector Fabrics working with Imagination Technologies to tap the power of multi-pipe and multi-core PowerVR GPUs

vfEmbedded OpenCL-based code development, analysis and parallelization tool will be showcased at SIGGRAPH 2011, Vancouver, 9 – 11 August, Imagination Technologies Booth 129

Eindhoven, The Netherlands, August 5, 2011: Vector Fabrics, a company that specializes in developing tools for the design, analysis and parallelization of multicore software, is demonstrating the initial results of its collaboration with Imagination Technologies at SIGGRAPH 2011. Vector Fabrics’ vfEmbedded tool makes it easy to analyze and parallelize software making full use of OpenCL for application processors with PowerVR SGX Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

PowerVR GPUs, as well as delivering market leading graphics performance, can also deliver immense computational power through OpenCL, which can provide a significant boost in performance for certain applications and algorithms. Until now it has been hard to harvest this computational power due to programming complexity.

Vector Fabrics’ vfEmbedded software development tool greatly assists developers in the parallelization of existing sequential programs and in the development of OpenCL-based parallel algorithms. By taking maximum advantage of the processing power of the PowerVR GPU, application developers can increase performance and lower power consumption of advanced application processor platforms.

“We’re delighted to be working with Imagination, a respected industry leader in mobile and embedded graphics, to help developers get the most out of their PowerVR GPUs through OpenCL,” says Mike Beunder, CEO of Vector Fabrics. “Upgrading a sequential program to run efficiently on a parallel GPGPU architecture is not an easy task. Programmers require intimate application knowledge, must learn new programming models and concepts, and avoid introducing hard-to-find bugs. Our vfEmbedded tool alleviates the developer from these tasks, greatly assisting the process of modifying sequential code to utilize fast and efficient OpenCL kernels that take maximum advantage of PowerVR GPUs.”

“We are pleased to be working with Vector Fabrics, an innovative developer of next generation parallelized software development tools,” says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies. “The computational capabilities of GPUs are set to rise dramatically year upon year. Developers will need access to tools to help them learn new parallel algorithm development skills and to tune effectively their solutions on target platforms. We believe vfEmbedded is a great example of a new wave of tools now becoming available to developers to drive the next wave of GPGPU-based algorithm development."

Background

Imagination's PowerVR graphics acceleration technologies are the standard for mobile graphics acceleration, already shipped in over 500m mobile products based on chips from Intel, NEC, Renesas, Samsung, Texas Instruments and others.

Vector Fabric’s vfEmbedded software development tool addresses the hard problem of partitioning and mapping software onto heterogeneous multicore SoC platforms. vfEmbedded lets you model your embedded platform, then takes you through the process of analyzing, parallelizing, and implementing your code. It is the only tool that gives you the precise information you need to make sure that the parallelized software will work correctly and have the highest performance on your multicore machine.

More information is available at http://www.vectorfabrics.com/