Award-winning PowerVR GR6500 ray tracing GPU tapes out

By Alexandru Voica - Imagination Blog, Jul. 16, 2015 – 

Last month I sent out a message on Twitter announcing that the latest PowerVR Wizard ray tracing GPU test silicon had taped out, based on Imagination’s reference design and the IC Compiler™ II place and route solution from Synopsys.

Given the enthusiastic response from developers, I thought I should write a short article about how we got here.

Firstly, I’d also like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone in the engineering team; they have worked really hard to take the Wizard architecture from a theoretical concept to a mature, real-world implementation that can now be found in silicon.

For those who haven’t kept track of our ray tracing solution, the PowerVR GR6500 GPU is the culmination of eight years of effort from a global team of designers. The technology was originally conceived at Caustic Graphics, a startup with a vision for interactive ray tracing, going against twenty years of industry momentum.

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