Texas Instruments has licensed an Imagination Technologies’ B-Series GPU for TI’s Jacinto automotive processor family.

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The GPU is the BXS-4-64 (generic BXS GPU right).

“BXS GPUs enable us to introduce automotive processors with higher performance, lower bandwidth and enhanced safety capabilities. IMG’s new multi-core technology also helps us scale our technology for future processor designs,” according to TI director Jim Kennedy.

BXS cores are specifically for automotive use and include safety features and a design process conforming to ISO 26262 to help customers achieve ISO 26262 certification.

They includes what Inagination product manager Andrew Girdler describes as a tool box of safety mechanisms that customers can pick from to meet industry-standard coverage standards, including the company’s ’tile regional protection’ (TRP, Imagination processed images as a series of square tiles) that gives displayed tiles tagged as safety-related higher processing priority that non-critical tiles when an image is displayed.

Million polygon meshes can be handled in some BXS cores, and multi-sample anti-aliasing can be used to smoothing edges for better images. Additional tolerance has been built in against varying memory access latency, said Girdler, for situations where the GPU looses priority over safety-related activities. Every BXS core gets ISO26262-compatible eight-way hardware virtualisation, he added.

A single core BXS-4-64 offers 64 32bit floating point operations per clock and 128 16bit flop/clock. It supports APIs including Vulkan 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.x/2.0/1.1 (+ extensions), OpenCL 3.0 and Android NN HAL.

The companies have yet to reveal how many cores are in the variant licensed – up to four cores is possible in a cluster.

It is not clear which Jacinto family is getting BXS. TI lists its TDA4VM Jacinto as including the earlier Imagination PowerVR Rogue 8XE GE8430 – Electronics Weekly has requested clarification.

Imagination is based in Hertfordshire. It was acquired in 2017 by private equity fund Canyon Bridge.