China has a separate GPU: Innosilicon Fenghua No.1 with chipsets, GDDR6X and support for DirectX and games

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A new standalone GPU manufacturer has emerged in China. Innosilicon claims to have a chip GPU that uses GDDR6X memory and allows you to play games, including those for DirectX on Windows.

China has its own processors, but it looks like it will soon get its own GPU. We have already heard about several projects of Chinese companies working on their own standalone GPU, now it seems that one such graphics card is ready. Innosilicon has announced a GPU named Fenghua No.1, which is designed mainly for servers, but can also play game graphics in OpenGL, Vulcan and DirectX in Windows, so it may be usable in a classic computer.

Innosilicon is not a brand new name in the silicon industry. Although we have not heard of it in the context of graphics (unlike GPU reports prepared by companies) Jingjia Micro a GlenFly/Zhaoxin), but Innosilicon was named as partner developing the first chip on the 7nm process of the Chinese factory SMIC. We do not know whether this is the now announced GPU, it is possible that something less demanding was chosen for the first attempt, such as the ASIC for cryptocurrency (the company has also or has been working on this type of business).

The GPU Innosilicon Fenghua No.1 (note: not entirely sure if this is the correct translation / transcription of the name, this is usually a bit of a problem with Chinese sources) is not yet fully ready for release. Its tape-out has now been announced, followed by the release of the product, which is about 9-15 months apart. Typically one year can be expected.

The parameters of this GPU are not specified, so we do not know what performance class it might be. However, the company states that Fenghua No.1 connects to the system via PCI Express 4.0 and supports output HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort or eDP 1.4, in addition to the cryptographic identifier PU PUF ’(Physical unclonable function), which should make it possible to unambiguously identify a specific piece of hardware for security purposes. It is mentioned that GPGU uses GDDR6X memory, which would be quite a surprise, because we would kindly expect them to remain the exclusivity of Nvidia. But it cannot be ruled out that this is a mistake in the press release.

Interestingly, this GPU is perhaps a chiplet, the press release talks about “Innolink chiplet” technology (and it’s in English and Latin, so this is probably not a compiler error). The application of chiplet assembly would imply that a relatively modern production process could be used and at the same time the resulting chiplet combination could be relatively large (to make sense to use chiplets). In other words, Fenghua No.1 could have quite a lot of computing units and thus non-trivial computing potential, although given the difference in experience, it probably won’t come as a surprise that this GPU will often chop up competing GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.

DirectX and game support

Innosilicon states that it is (among other things) a GPU for servers and data centers, but it will not be exclusively a computational accelerator, as already indicated by the support of video outputs. It is said that 3D graphics are supported in Linux, Android and Windows within the API OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenCL, Vulkan and also DirectX, so you have to play on this card. The possibility of VR and AR applications and AI acceleration is also explicitly mentioned.

Cards with this GPU should therefore be usable for cloud gaming, where games streamed as video to end devices will run on the server, but at least in theory it could be possible to use these GPUs directly in the local desktop PC. But we do not know if the company plans to sell them freely for this clientele. It is possible that from the beginning it will be limited to data center clients and for the current market the hardware will be available in some of the next generations, if the company manages to capture and tune the software ecosystem to a sufficient level. Controllers and their associated game features are a relatively difficult and complex thing. Therefore, no brand other than Nvidia and AMD / ATi has penetrated the stand-alone gaming GPU market for some 15 to 20 years, and Intel has the best chance thanks to the long-term development of its integrated GPUs.

So how this will turn out is still uncertain, we will see if the hardware developed will have competitive performance and how the software side and game support will turn out. In China, however, there is definitely a demand (it does not matter that it can be mainly politically motivated) for a local solution. This is an extra bonus for Innosilicon and similar companies, which can enable success and a worse solution that would not otherwise be able to compete.

Resources: Innosilicon Technology, VideoCardz