Vivante Announces Support for Vulkan GPU Rendering and Compute Standards

New close to the metal APIs are a natural fit for Vivante's Vega GPU Architecture

SAN FRANCISCO -- March 3, 2015 -- Game Developers Conference 2015 (#GDC15, #MWC15) -- Vivante­^TM Corporation welcomes today's Khronos Group's announcement at GDC of the new Vulkan^TM open standard API—an innovative, ground-up design that will unleash the newest innovations inside Vivante's latest GPU hardware. Vivante is proud to be a Khronos^TM Group Promoter and contributor to the Vulkan API specification. Vulkan represents a new generation of highly efficient graphics and compute APIs that will help drive the next generation Vivante GPU-powered devices and allow OEMs in a range of industries to maximize performance on the widely available industry standard platforms with Vivante GPUs.

While Vivante and the Khronos Group will continue to evolve and fully support the well-established OpenGL^® ES, OpenGL, and OpenCL^TM API standards, this new class of standards is a welcome GPU industry development. Efficient API standards are a natural fit for Vivante's highly silicon and power efficient architectures which will enable application and OEM product developers to squeeze the most performance out of Vivante GPU powered IoT platforms found in wearables, phones, tablets, printers, cameras, automotive, home entertainment, and industrial applications. Vulkan will especially benefit deeply embedded systems such as digital automotive display and network video client applications where squeezing the most quality and performance out of the GPU is integral to product differentiation.

Efficient, Close to Metal
Vulkan hammers the API thinner, with a precise specification that enables direct GPU control and multithreading efficiency to maximize performance, as well as combining and optimizing graphics and compute.

Developer Friendly
Vulkan's common, extensible architecture for debugging and profiling will make collaboration easier than ever. Additionally, SPIR-V, an intermediate compiling language that will offer a significant opportunity for Vivante ecosystem partners to leverage and converge languages for graphics and compute.

"Efficient, close to metal, developer-friendly GPU APIs combining rendering with compute are a natural fit for Vivante's highly efficient GPU architectures," said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante. "The top challenge our customers see across a range of applications is how to optimize the available silicon and memory resources to meet tight power/thermal and area budgets. Vulkan represents an opportunity for Vivante to extend our established leadership position in power-performance per area while expanding the options available to a broad class of clients in wearables, automotive displays, IoT and industrial devices."

About Vivante Corporation
Smaller – Faster – Cooler: Vivante Corporation, a leader in multi-core GPU, Compute, CPC Composition Engine and Vector Graphics IP solutions, provides the highest performance and lowest power silicon characteristics across a range of Khronos Group API conformant standards based on the Vega architecture. Vivante GPUs are integrated into customer silicon in devices targeting wearables, IoT, smartphones, tablets, HDTVs, automotive, consumer electronics and other embedded devices and running thousands of graphics/compute applications across multiple operating systems and software platforms. Vivante is a privately held company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with additional R&D centers in Shanghai and Chengdu.