Imagination claims 60 percent performance improvement with new smartphone GPU

Chip designer Imagination Technologies has announced the PowerVR Series7, GPU designs that are intended for mobile devices, among other things. The fastest variant, the Series7XT GT7900, contains 512 cores. The new socs would perform up to 60 percent better than the old ones.

The new Series7 architecture, codenamed Rogue, has two variants: Series7XT offers up to 512 aluminum cores, while the more energy-efficient Series7XE variant is designed with 16 or 32 aluminum cores. The chip designer claims that the new GPU designs offer up to 60 percent better performance than his current Series6 designs at the same clock speed and cluster size at the same clock speed and cluster size.

According to Imagination Technologies, the PowerVR XT GPUs can be used not only for midrange and high-end mobiles and tablets, but also in set-top boxes, consoles and servers. The GPUs would, among other things, enable HDR rendering and ‘realistic’ 4k texturing. The GPU design can handle 10bit Yuv color space. The XE and XT GPUs also support both OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL ES 3.1. Open CL 1.2, a standard for gpgpu applications, is also supported. The new GPUs also offer virtualization functions and the XT variant optionally supports DirectX 11. It is not yet clear when the first socs will appear based on the Series7 GPUs.

The PowerVR GPU designs are used by Apple for its A-series of SOCs, among others, and by Intel for some Atoms. Texas Instruments, AllWinner and MediaTek also have licenses to use the designs.