Imagination Technologies is introducing its next-gen graphics architecture for phones, tablets, set-top-boxes and other devices including wearables.
We probably won’t actually see any products with PowerVR Series 7 graphics until late 2015, but Imagination is unveiling its new designs now so that chip makers can incorporate the technology into future products.
Not surprisingly the company is promising higher-performance graphics processing and improved efficiency. You could probably say the same thing about nearly any company designing chips for mobile devices.
The new designs also add hardware support for Android Extension Pack, DirectX 11.2, and OpenCL FP64.
Imagination has two different versions of its new PowerVR designs. Serie 7XE is a lower-performance (and cheaper) architecture designed for low-to-mid range devices, while the Series7XTÂ designs are aimed at mid-to-high range devices.
The company says its new high-end graphics offers up to 60 percent higher performance than the older PowerVR Series6XT at the same clock speed. Series7XE GPUs, meanwhile, offer up to a 108 percent improvement.
Series7XT designs include versions with 2 to 16 shading clusters and 64 to 512 ALU cores for what Imagination says is desktop-class performance with support for HDR rendering, 4K texturing, and physical shading.
There are only two Series7XE designs, the PowerVR GE7400 GPU with half a shading cluster and 16 ALU cores and the GE7800 with 1 shading cluster and 32 ALU cores.
While chips with these graphics processors won’t offer the same kind of performance, Imagination suggests these chips could bring improved graphics capabilities to the type of entry-level devices that sell for between $75 and $200 as well as devices like wearables and Internet-of-Things products where you don’t necessarily need desktop-class 3D graphics performance.
If you’re looking for a more detailed analysis of the new chips, check out AnandTech’s writeup.
Do these guys play nice with our Linux-based brethren in the form of drivers, etc?
I’m pretty sure they would only release blobs… source code drivers would completely give-away their hardware architecture (and that could give competitors an advantage). Past/Preset/Future of graphics drivers are blobs.
On another topic, do Nvidia mobile GPUs have any competitive advantage over PowerVR? Are they smaller, use less power, more flexible, have standard HPC precision? I really like how there is lots of competition in the mobile GPU space… keeps value high for the customer.
intel is the current state of the art on drivers. Everything is open. Arm will lose to intel if this continues and as intel slowly but surely becomes more competitive in mobile.