Innosilicon's Fenghua II Low-Power GPU Launched: 4W – 15W TGP

Innosilicon has introduced its second-generation standalone graphics processor, the Fenghua II (aka Fantasy II). The new GPU has a power consumption between 4W and 15W, so it does not require either auxiliary PCIe power or active cooling, which is why it can target entry-level desktops and notebooks.  

Despite expectations, Innosilicon's second-generation discrete GPU does not offer higher performance than its predecessor. In fact, with raw compute performance of 1.5 FP32 TFLOPS/12 INT8 TOPS, the Fantasy II is actually more than three times slower than single-chip Fantasy I graphics card (which offers up to 5 FP32 TFLOPS/up to 25 INT8 TOPS performance), according to 163.com (via @Loeschzwerg_3DC) .The indisputable advantage of the new graphics card is its power consumption that ranges between 4W and 15W as opposed to 20W to 50W for single-chip Fantasy I. Meanwhile, performance-per-watt of the novelty remained at the same level with its bigger sibling.

Innosilicon's Fantasy I and Fantasy II Graphics Cards

Given the compute performance of the Fantasy II GPU, it will compete against Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1630 graphics board that uses the TU117 GPU originally introduced in April 2019. In fact, even AMD's Radeon RX 6400 might outperform the Fantasy II, based on its compute capabilities (and something tells us that this one will never find itself in our list of the best graphics cards available today). Meanwhile, Innosilicon does not publish performance results of its new graphics chip in real games. The only thing it says is that it hits 6500 in the outdated GLMark2 benchmark, according to ITHome. 

Innosilicon does not disclose which architecture powers its Fantasy II GPU, though we may speculate that the new graphics chip uses the same ImgTec's PowerVR architecture which is used for the Fantasy I GPU. That said, the new graphics processor supports DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and even OpenGL ES application programming interfaces (APIs). Meanwhile, the new graphics processor has a built-in RISC-V security core with physical unclonable function (PUF). 

The Fantasy II GPU can support 2GB, 4GB, 8GB LPDDR4/4X/5/5X memory configurations with an up to 10 GT/s data transfer speed. The chip supports a DisplayPort/eDP 1.4, two HDMI 2.0, LVDS, and D-Sub/VGA outputs, though there is no word how many display pipelines it has (i.e., how many monitors it can support simultaneously). As for host interface, the chip uses a PCIe 3.0 x8 bus. 

While Innosilicon's Fantasy II is definitely not the best entry-level GPU around, it has another advantage over discrete graphics products from AMD, Intel and Nvidia (in addition to its low power consumption): it supports the vast majority of Linux distributions (including those exclusively used in China), such as CentOS, Kirin, KylinOS, Tongxin, UOS and Ubuntu. Furthermore, it supports all Chinese CPU platforms (something that GPUs from leading vendors do not support), such as Loongson, Huawei Kunpeng, Hygon Dhyana, Shenwei (Sunway) and Zhaoxin Feiteng. Furthermore, Innosilicon plans to release Windows 10 drivers for its Fantasy-series GPUs.