Imagination Technologies is launching its most powerful graphics processor yet. The PowerVR GT7900 GPU features 512 ALU cores, 16 shader clusters, and when clocked at 800 MHz, the GT7900 run at speeds of up to 800 gigaflops in floating point 32 mode, or 1.6 teraflops in the low-power FP16 mode.

Don’t expect to find this chip in your next smartphone though. Imagination is targeting affordable game consoles, which means it’s much more likely you’ll find it in upcoming Android TV boxes.

gt7900_01

For the sake of comparison, when unveiling the Tegra X1 processor in January, NVIDIA called it the first mobile chip with teraflop performance. But with a clock speed of 1 GHz, the Tegra X1 is expected to offer one TFLOP in FP16 mode and 512 GFLOPs in FP32 mode.

Other features of the PowerVR GT7900 GPU include 10-bit YUV color support 4K video plaback at 60 frames per second, and support for OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android Extension Pack.

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25 replies on “Imagination unveils PowerVR GT7900 graphics for low-cost game consoles”

  1. Impressive, but there is one thing that should be noted:

    “At a target frequency of 800 MHz for 16nm FinFET+, PowerVR GT7900 delivers 800 GFLOPS in FP32 mode and 1.6 TFLOPS in FP16 mode.”

    16nm FinFET+ is TSMC and might only make it to market in H2 2015.

    Tegra X1 is running on 20nm TSMC, which is already available. A Denver version of Tegra X1, on a 16nm FF or 16nm FF+ process, will likely launch around the same time.

  2. The idea of MIPS for an Android gaming consoles sounds like a bad idea. I remember seeing on various apps (can’t remember which) a statement declaring incompatability with MIPS. When apps state their compatibility MIPS tends to be one of the worst to suffer. If games face the same limitations it could seriously limit the library of titles available. Let’s not forget that the GPU performance isn’t worth much without a matching CPU (something seen on the desktop side quite often in gaming rigs).

    That said it sounds good. Any words on release date? After all, if it’s far off in the future then it might not be so impressive as if it ships in devices this year.

    1. wasn’t the ps2 mips? developers went to great lengths to program for it. i know more shit has been mips than stuff that immediately comes to mind, not just like routers n stuff

    2. Those performance numbers are based on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET+, which might only make it to market sometime in H2 2015.

  3. This sounds Awesome. Now I wonder when it will be release and when I can get my hands on one?

    1. Yes I would like that as well. But Mips With a high-end GPU sounds awesome. I wonder what kind of games will run on it?

  4. FP16 is not a flop, it’s FP64! I wish websites would stop lapping up this marketing BS!

    1. Floating-point numbers can be stored using different precisions: FP16 is widely used by developers for rendering high-resolution user interfaces at lower power or in casual gaming where you don’t need FP32.

      FP64 is only used in HPC-style applications (e.g. compute servers for physics simulations) and has extremely limited applications in mobile and embedded applications.

      FP64 does not automatically imply better performance, it only stores higher precision numbers.

          1. Yes, that is correct. Every MIPS I6400 CPU can be configured to have between 1-4 threads per core and 1-6 cores per cluster. We also scale up to 64 clusters.

  5. I think that someone will replace the AMD soon, both in the processors and GPU, could be made in ARM or any other technology, but in my view, AMD will die, she is already wasting away.

    Maybe Samsung, Mediatek or Qualcomm, not sure.

    1. I can assure you samsung, Mediatek and Qualcomm are not wasting away!

      Mediatek is growing so rapidly with market share in China it’s astonishing!

        1. AMD’s Death Clock is slowly but surely approaching. AMD will die because of themselves not Intel or ARM.

    2. Yes thats right and a lot of AMD fanbois don’t get that. I have been saying that for years now.

      1. people just didn’t like the x86 monopoly which keeps costs high and are still keeping costs high. cream your jeans in private, please

        1. Face it Fanboi AMD is dying and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Fact: We WANT AMD to make Great Products. Fact: AMD NEVER makes Great Products only bad products not worth buying.

          1. OK AMD is terrible, but you like the Xbox One. Let’s see, something is wrong there. Looks like they got a good boost in business with the PS4 and X one. It is inevitable that someone will build better processors and GPUs than AMD and Nvidia which run cool enough (less juice) for great game consoles. That’s why I am at this forum. Imagination is only a year or two away from just that. Just look how far they have come since the Ipad sgx543 which was still great a couple years back. Long winded I know, thanks for allowing me to share my opinions.

          2. Wrong I don’t like either the PS4 or Xbox One. Both are Crappy consoles with outdated and obsolete hardware from the beginning. It won’t keep them alive for much longer. Zen 110% won’t deliver ANYWHERE near what AMD needs to deliver and that will be the end of AMD. Imagination with their GT7900 will be there when it released late this year or early next year.

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