Up until a few years ago, Apple’s iPhone and iPad chips used PowerVR graphics licensed from Imagination Technologies. But in 2017 Apple decided to start designing its own GPUs in-house, Imagination put itself up for sale, divided into two companies and sold both off.

Imagination didn’t stop designing chips though — and now the company says it’s releasing the “most important” GPU in 15 years.

The new IMG A-Series of GPUs are designed for a range of devices including smartphones and tablets, servers, automotive devices, and Internet of Things products. And Imagination says they offer up to 2.5 times the performance of previous-generation Imagination graphics processing units, while consuming 60-percent less power.

Those numbers are a bit fuzzy — because Imagination is comparing its best new GPUs against the best currently shipping previous-gen Imagination PowerVR GPUs (as opposed to the best ones the company had designed, but which aren’t actually in use).

Still, the new IMG A-Series seems like a big leap forward for Imagination, which might help explain why the company is dropping the PowerVR branding.

Imagination doesn’t actually manufacture its own GPUs. The company designs technologies that can be licensed by chip makers. It’s unlikely that Apple or Qualcomm will license the new designs — they both develop their own GPUs in-house. And Samsung has signed a deal with AMD.

But other chip makers such as MediaTek, Rockchip, and Allwinner may be in the market for higher-performance GPUs. While Imagination isn’t naming any names just yet, the company’s press release states that the new GPU technology has already been “licensed for multiple markets and the first SoC devices are expected in 2020.”

So far, the IMG A-Series breaks down into the following designs:

  • IMG AXT-64-2048 – flagship performance; 2.0 TFLOPS, 64 Gpixels and 8 TOPS of AI performance
  • IMG AXT-48-1536 – premium mobile; 1.5 TFLOPS, 48 Gpixels and 6 TOPS
  • IMG AXT-32-1024 – high-performance mobile and automotive; 1 TFLOPs, 32 Gpixels and 4 TOPS
  • IMG AXT-16-512 – high-mid-performance mobile and automotive; 0.5 TFLOPS, 16 Gpixels and 2 TOPS
  • IMG AXM-8-256 – mid-range mobile; 0.25 TFLOPS, 8 Gpixels and 1 TOPS
  • IMG AXE-2-16 – premium IoT, entry DTV/STB, display and other fillrate driven applications; 2 PPC, 16 GFLOPS and 2 Gpixels
  • IMG AXE-1-16 – entry-level mobile and IoT and the fastest Vulkan-capable GPU in its class; 1 PPC, 16 GFLOPS and 1 Gpixels

In an effort to stay competitive in years to come, Imagination has also laid out rough plans for the next few years — promising to deliver an IMG B-series GPU in late 2020 that will offer up to 3 TFLOPs of performance, with new C-Series and D-Series chips coming in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

If you want to check out a deep dive on the new IMG A-series architecture, I highly recommend reading AnandTech’s detailed overview.

 

 

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

3 replies on “Imagination launches IMG A-Series GPUs for mobile devices and much more”

  1. I’m guessing they’ll have their usual close sourced proprietary drivers that they don’t maintain.

    1. The do run a GPU degree course and have donee since 2015, the latest 2020 course based PowerVR just launched.
      ” Imagination Technologies has announced an update to its course on mobile graphics for undergraduate teaching as part of its university programme.

      The course has been developed such that little previous knowledge of graphics is required. The modules cover mobile graphics technologies and their architectures; the PowerVR framework for mobile graphics development; mobile graphics software development kits (SDKs); texturing; transformations and example shader code including lighting models.

      Owen says the PowerVR SDK is acknowledged as a leading software environment, and boasts powerful tuning and debugging features. “

    2. They may be proprietary, and they may not maintain it, but…
      …that doesn’t mean it needs maintaining or that their drivers are bad in anyway.

      In fact, I will come in defence of them and say they’ve been one of the best competitors in the market until Qualcomm’s interference with licenses and ARM Mali’s “free” designs. It would’ve worked well for Samsung to acquire them and use Custom Cores and Custom Graphics to compete against Apple’s solutions. But looks like more and more people are going “stock” and that would’ve been a good thing if it wasn’t for the discrepancy in performance.

Comments are closed.