CES 2014: Imagination’s New GPUs Are 50 Percent Faster

Imagination Technologies has revealed three new mobile GPU designs in the Series6XT family, promising an up to 50 percent increase in performance, while reducing power consumption.

The new silicon is intended for smartphones, tablets, wearable technology, cars and even laptops and desktops.

“As we continue to increase the speed of innovation for our market-leading GPU offerings, we’re continuing to pull away from the competition and our customers are benefiting from having access to the latest technologies,” commented Tony King-Smith, EVP of marketing at Imagination.

The new GPUs have already been licensed to a number of partners, and devices featuring Series6XT are expected to begin shipping immediately.

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UK-based Imagination Technologies is one of the world’s leading designers of mobile GPUs. Its customers include Apple, which integrates PowerVR cores into Systems-on-a-Chip (SoCs) used in iPhone and iPad, as well as BlackBerry, Samsung, Intel and Texas Instruments.

PowerVR Series6XT Rogue architecture supports up to eight compute clusters optimised for DirectX 10, OpenGL ES 3.0, and OpenCL 1.x acceleration. It offers “significant parallel processing power” that results in up to 50 percent increase in performance over the last generation of Imagination chips, and supports the extended colour gamut of 4K formats.

The new processor family builds on the success of the Series 6, which claimed to deliver industry’s best performance per mm².

The first three chips in the new range – GX6250, GX6450 and GX6650 – have two, four and six compute clusters respectively. All of them feature ‘PowerGearing’ power management that enables fine-tuned control of GPU resources.

Imagination has also improved its Hierarchical Scheduling Technology (HST) leading to higher resource utilization, and added PVR3C triple compression which, by condensing textures, images and geometry, reduces bandwidth and power requirements even further.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has claimed that its new Tegra K1 mobile SoC can compete with the recently launched PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in terms of visual performance.

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