Vivante Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

, 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 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

-compatible graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of playing PC games. In 2007, GiQuila changed its name to Vivante and changed the direction of the company to focus on the design and licensing of embedded graphics processing unit designs. The company is licensing its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers that serve

embedded computing An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' as ...

markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment. Vivante is 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

Since changing directions Vivante has 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 their i.MX models. 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:

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 The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations su ...

kernel driver for the Vivante hardware, since Vivante previously put out their 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.

References

External links