Stewart Randall, an author at TechNode, has shared a video on his personal Twitter account of Innosilicon's Fenghua 1 graphics card up and running. The Fenghua 1 is the first homegrown Chinese GPU, and even though its specifications are public, its performance remains a mystery. Therefore, it's unknown whether it has what it takes to hang with the best graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD, but the video proves the cards are up and running.
The demonstration showed the Fenghua 1 running on the GFXBench benchmark, specifically the T-Rex scene. Unfortunately, an FPS counter wasn't present during the benchmark run, and we didn't get to see the result screen afterward. Nevertheless, the footage looks pretty smooth. Then again, GFXBench is more oriented to mobile devices, so the software isn't the best performance judge for discrete graphics cards.
Due to the quality of the video, it's hard to tell whether the Fenghua 1 Type-A (single GPU) or Type-B (dual GPU) was on the test system. We're more inclined to the former, but Randall shared a photograph of the latter in a subsequent tweet. You can see the video and image in the embedded tweet below:
Innosilicon graphics card. pic.twitter.com/lyMpQAo5KmDecember 23, 2021
The Fenghua 1, which likely leverages Imagination Technologies' PowerVR architecture, is a product of the 12nm manufacturing process. Theoretically, the Type-A variant delivers up to 5 TFLOPs of FP32 performance, putting it on the same level as a GeForce RTX 2060 (Turing). On the other hand, the Type-B mode, which combines two chips, offers up to 10 TFLOPs of FP3 performance. If we had to pick a mainstream model as a reference, the Fenghua 1 Type-B is comparable to Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 3060 (Ampere), at least on paper.
As Innosilicon has revealed, the Fenghua 1 Type-A takes advantage of the latest PCIe 4.0 interface. The graphics card may arrive with 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB of GDDR6 or GDDR6X (19 Gbps) memory. Regarding bandwidth, the Fenghua 1 Type-A supplies up to 304 GBps. That's around 10% less than a GeForce RTX 2060.
The graphics card sports HDMI 2.1 ports and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, although Innosilicon didn't specify the exact number of interfaces. For power consumption, the company identified a power draw less than 20W in desktop applications and less than 50W in multi-channel cloud workloads. It'd be interesting to see how much power the Fenghua 1 Type-A pulls in games and how that equates to performance-per-watt.
Fenghua 1 samples have already made their way to companies interested in using the graphics card inside their products. However, retail availability and pricing are unknown at this point.
