Feature Story

Imagination Technologies Launches Next-Gen PowerVR Series 7 GPUs

Aimed at improving efficiency and performance in wearables and IoT devices

IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES has announced its next generation GPUs, the PowerVR Series7, based on the firm's Rogue architecture seen on the likes of Intel Atom and MediaTek smartphone chips.

Under the new PowerVR Rogue architecture, Imagination has launched a line of GPUs which scale from 16 to 512 arithmetic logic unit cores, which the company said will provide scalability, efficiency and performance in upcoming wearables and Internet of Things devices running Android 5.0 Lollipop in the automotive, mobile and consumer markets.

"PowerVR Series7 is architected for the broadest range of next-generation products, up to high-performance GPU compute," the firm said.

"Highly configurable, scalable GPUs address market requirements across these segments, with new features such as full hardware virtualisation and Android Extension Pack support with hardware tessellation, as well as proven features such as geometry shaders, PVR3C triple compression technology for bandwidth/power savings, and full adaptive scalable texture compression support."

The new Series7 generation includes PowerVR Series7XT and Series7XE, two families of GPUs targeting the largest range of devices, from next-generation smartphones and tablets running Android 5.0 to smart TVs and set-top boxes, wearables or cars.

Series7 also includes Imagination's PowerGearing technology, which it says allows more dynamic core- and cluster-level power management.

According to Imagination, the Series7XT and Series7XE GPUs achieve up to a 60 architectural performance increase on the latest industry standard benchmarks compared with equivalent configurations of previous generation PowerVR Series6XT/6XE GPUs.

"Application developers can take advantage of the significant parallel processing power in Series7 for graphics and GPU compute tasks," Imagination said, adding that Series7 architectural enhancements include instruction set enhancements that result in improved application performance and increased GPU efficiency.

It also brings a new hierarchical layout structure that allows scalable polygon throughput and pixel fill-rate improvements in addition to increased clock frequencies and GPU compute setup and cache throughput improvements.

These are expected to result in 300 percent better parallel processing performance, said the firm.

PowerVR Series7XE and Series7XT GPUs are available for licensing from today.

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