Imagination brings real-time hyper-realistic ray tracing to mobile kit

err...

actually I think you'll find ray-tracing traces the ray backwards, from the image plane, through the scene, and into a light source, or if it leaves the extent of the geometry to simulated ambient. That way you end up doing billions less calculations per frame.

</pedant>

carry on

Constraints?

I need two numbers at a minimum. Price & TDP.

Appropriate

Since the chip is aimed at mobile devices, it's quite understandable it's specialized for doing calculations in single precision and half precision. But I'll be more excited if the same technology gets applied to better parts for doing double precision calculations.

Which reminds me. When the IBM 360 replaced the IBM 7094 and friends, there was a lot of complaining that while 36-bit floating point was good enough for a lot of scientific work, 32-bit floating point was almost a dead loss from that point of view. IEEE 754, with a hidden first bit, and a base-2 instead of base-16 exponent, tries to improve matters for 32 bits as much as possible, but changing 29 bits (32 minus 3 for the smallest hex first digit) to 33 bits (32 plus 1 for the hidden first bit) doesn't get you to 36 bits.

So parts with faster 36-bit or 48-bit FP than possible for 64-bit FP might please some boffins.

Bull.

Yeah, they've developed a chip for mobile phones which outperform nVidia's flagship cards. My ass.

As for single vs double precision: this chip is aimed at gaming and gaming gear is always optimized for single precision. nVidias and AMDs gaming product lines have crippled double precision to avoid competing with their enterprise product lines.