Oppo customizes with its new 6nm MariSilicon X image NPU with 20-bit HDR pipeline: Digital photography review
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Smartphone maker Oppo has announced it has developed its own internal neural processing unit (NPU) to include inside its future mobile devices. This new 6nm chipset, which Oppo calls MariSilicon X, consists of an NPU, an image signal processor (ISP), and a custom memory architecture, all of which work together to improve photography. of mobile photography.
Oppo says the MariSilicon X NPU, which is just a small part of the entire chipset needed to power smartphones, can handle up to 18 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of the smartphone. int8 at 11.6 TOPS per watt. For comparison, the Neural Engine inside Apple’s A15 Bionic used in their iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max devices hit 15.8 TOPS.
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To put those numbers into a real scenario, Oppo says its MariSilicon X can process the AI noise reduction algorithm 20 times faster while using less than half the power of a running smartphone. Snapdragon 888 chip. While a cherry-picked benchmark doesn’t indicate overall performance, it does show how vertically integrated Oppo’s custom silicon and algorithms can work together to improve performance. Quickly process information while maintaining battery life.
MariSilicon X can process up to 8.5GB per second with shared DDR memory and uses a 20-bit HDR image pipeline that can run algorithms directly on RAW data, instead of using compressed data like some other chipsets. Oppo says applying its algorithms on the original image data results in a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 8dB. The NPU also uses what Oppo calls a Dual Image Pipeline with ‘dual raw supersampling’. That means the MariSilicon X works with the RGBW sensor to capture the RGB and W signals separately, and then combine the data together to get ‘8.6dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio and improved 1.7 times improvement in texture quality’,
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This is especially notable as OPPO claims to be working on developing a ‘Next Generation’ RGBW sensor. back in august at ‘Future Imaging Technology Launch Event.’ As we noted in our original coverage, ‘Oppo claims [the RGBW sensor] can capture 60% more light than previous-generation sensors while reducing noise by 35%” and says it has “developed a new “Quadra pixel binning algorithm” designed to reduce moiré, which was a problem with its first generation of RGBW sensors. ‘
Together, the MariSilicon X and the ‘next generation RGBW’ sensor could make a powerful combination in Oppo’s upcoming smartphones, with 20-bit Raw, 4K Ultra HDR, 4K video Night Videos and more. You can check out the full 51-minute Oppo Inno Day presentation below:
