Vivante Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China. The company was founded in 2004 as GiQuila and focused on the portable gaming market. The company's first product was a DirectX-compatible graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of playing PC games. In 2007, GiQuila changed its name to Vivante and shifted the direction of the company to the design and licensing of embedded graphics processing unit designs. The company licensed its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers, serving embedded computing markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment.

Vivante used to be named as a contributor to the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation.

In 2015, VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd. acquired Vivante Corporation in an all-stock transaction.

Products

After its business pivot, Vivante developed a range of GPU cores that are compliant with the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 standards as well as the OpenVG standard. Created by VeriSilicon support for the Vulkan API 1.0 and for OpenVX 1.0 is provided for at least 6 major desktop and embedded operating systems.

2D graphics products & Vector GPUs, summarized by the vendor under the term "Composition Processing Cores" (CPC), sometimes mentioned with the feature of single pass composition blending capability of 8 or higher, are the GC300, GC320, GC350 and GP355 (OpenVG core)with the additional listing of GC200 and GC420. NXP further mentions GC255 in a presentation for its i.MX models.2D and 3D Graphics in Freescale Devices The NXP i.MX8 series will come with 2 units of the GC7000Lite or GC7000 vector processor. For 3D graphics products please see the table below.

Legend for the notes in below listing: Pipelined FP/INT double (64-bit), single/high (32-bit) and half precision/medium (16-bit) precision IEEE formats for GPU Compute and HDR graphics, Source:

SeriesModelDateShader CoresSP/Half (mode)Silicon area (mm2)Core ClockMax in MHzShader ClockMax in MHzFillrateBus width(bit)API (version)Shader GFLOPS(High=SP / Medium=Half)UsageM triangles/sG vertices/s(GP/s)(GT/s)OpenGL ESOpenVGOpenCLOpenGLDirect3D GCNano GCNano Lite 1 (VEC-4) 0.3 @ 28 nm 100–200 @ 28HPM 100–200 @ 28HPM 40 0.1 0.2 N/A 1.1 N/AN/AN/A 3.2? GCNano 1 (VEC-4) 0.5 @ 28 nm 200 @ 28HPM 200 @ 28HPM 40 0.1 0.2 2.0 3.2 STM32MP157 GCNano Ultra(Vega-Lite) GCNano Ultra 1 (VEC-4) 1 @ 28 nm 400 @ 28HPM 800 @ 28HPM 80 0.2 0.4 1.2

optional 6.4 NXP i.MX8M Mini GCNano Ultra3 1 (VEC-4) 1.6 @ 28 nm 400 @ 28HPM 800 @ 28HPM 80 0.2 0.4? 3.0 6.4? GC200 GC200 0.57 @ 65 nm 250 @ 65nmLP375 @ 65nmG+ 0.375 32/16 Jz4760Mobile GPU (Vivante Graphics ...) GC400 GC400 1 (VEC-4)4 (VEC-1) 1.42 @ 65 nm 250 @ 65nmLP375 @ 65nmG+ 19 0.094 0.188 32/16 2.0Vivante Product Brief 1.1 EP 11 3 NXP i.MX6 SoloX: GC400T GC500 32/16 PXA920: GC530 GC600 GC600 1 (VEC-4)4 (VEC-1) 32/16 1.2/1.1 3.0/2.1 11 CuBox GC800 GC800 1 (VEC-4)4 (VEC-1) 2.53.38 @ 65 nm 800 @ 28HPM250 @ 65nmLP375 @ 65nmG+ 1000 @ 28HPM 38 @ 65nmG+ 0.188 @ 65nmG+ 0.375 @ 65nmG+ 32/16 3.0 1.2 optional 3.0/2.1 11 8 / 16 RK291x,ATM7013, ATM7019 GC860 1 (VEC-4)4 (VEC-1) ? @ 65nm 444 35 0.3 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 Jz4770: GCW Zero NOVO7 GC880 1 (VEC-4)4 (VEC-1) 35 0.1 0.266 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 3.2 NXP i.MX6 Solo and DualLite GCx000 GC1000(Vega-Lite) 2 (VEC-4)8 (VEC-1) 3.54.26 @ 65 nm 800 @ 28HPM500 @ 65nmLP750 @ 65nmG+ 1000 @ 28HPM 12358 @ 65nmG+ 0.50.375 @ 65nmG+ 0.80.75 @ 65nmG+ 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 16 ATM7029: GC1000+,Marvell PXA986,PXA988, PXA1088 GC2000 4 (VEC-4)16 (VEC-1) 6.9 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 267 1 1.6 32/16 1.2 3.0/2.1 11 32 NXP i.MX6 Dual and Quad GC4000 8 (VEC-4)32 (VEC-1) 12.4 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 267 2 1.6 8 3.0/2.1 11 64 HiSilicon K3V2 Vega xX GC3000(Vega 1X) 4/8 (VEC-4)16/32 (VEC-1) 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 267 1 1.6 8/4 3.0/2.1 11 32 / 64 NXP S32V234 GC5000(Vega 2X) 8/16 (VEC-4)32/64 (VEC-1) 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 267 1 1.6 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 64 / 128 Marvell PXA1928 GC6000(Vega 4X)GC6400? 16/32 (VEC-4)64/128 (VEC-1) 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 533 4 3.2 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 128 / 256 GC7000(Vega 8X) GC7000 UltraLiteGC1500? 8 Vega 0.5 0.8 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 16 / 32 Marvell PXA1908NXP i.MX8M Nano GC7000 LiteGC7000L? 16 Vega 1 1.6 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 32 / 64 Marvel PXA1936NXP i.MX 8QuadPlusNXP i.MX 8Quad NXP i.MX8M GC7000 32 Vega 800 @ 28HPM 1000 @ 28HPM 1067 2 6.4 3.2 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 64 / 128 NXP i.MX 8QuadMax GC7200 64 Vega 4 6.4 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 128 / 256 GC7400 128 Vega 8 12.8 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 256 / 512 GC7600 256 Vega 16 25.6 32/16 3.0/2.1 11 512 / 1024 GC8000 GC8000 SeriesModelDateShader CoresSP/Half (mode)Silicon area (mm2)Core ClockMax in MHzShader ClockMax in MHzFillrateBus width(bit)API (version)Shader GFLOPS(High=SP / Medium=Half)UsageM triangles/sG vertices/s(GP/s)(GT/s)OpenGL ESOpenVGOpenCLOpenGLDirect3D

Adoption They have announced that as of 2009 they have at least fifteen licensees who have used their GPUs in twenty embedded designs. Application processors using Vivante GPU technology: Marvell ARMADA range of SoCs NXP / Freescale i.MX Series Ingenic Semiconductor Jz4770 ICT Godson-2H Rockchip RK2918 Actions Semiconductor ATM7029 HiSilicon K3V2 InfoTM iMAP×210

GC8000 Series After Vivante was sold to VeriSilicon the Arcturus GC8000 series was released by VeriSilicon, which supports newer technologies such as OpenCL 3.0, OpenVX 1.2, OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenGL 4.0 and Vulkan 1.1.

Linux support

There are no plans on writing a new DRM/KMS driver kernel driver for the Vivante hardware, since Vivante previously put out its Linux kernel component under the GNU General Public License (GPL), instead of maintaining it as a proprietary blob. The free Gallium3D-style device driver etna_viv has surpassed Vivante's own proprietary user-space driver in some benchmarks. It supports Vivante's product line of GC400 Series, GC800 Series, GC1000 Series, GC2000 Series, GC3000 Series, GC4000 Series, and GC7000lite.

See also PowerVR – available as SIP block to 3rd parties Mali – available as SIP block to 3rd parties Adreno – found only on Qualcomm Snapdragon, could be available as SIP block to 3rd parties Tegra – family of SoCs for mobile computers, the graphics core could be available as SIP block to 3rd parties Atom family of SoCs – with Intel graphics core, not licensed to 3rd parties AMD mobile APUs – with AMD graphics core, not licensed to 3rd parties

References

External links