Imagination Technologies Announces Scalable PowerVR Series7 GPUs
The company is targeting a wide range of products, everything from wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices (Series7XE GPUs), to next-generation servers and 3D gaming consoles (Series7XT GPUs).
"With graphics-enabled devices entering all aspects of everyday life, it is no longer possible to offer just point solutions. Each new generation requires a wavefront of GPUs from low to high end, to address the broad spectrum of application," says Tony King-Smith, executive vice president of marketing for Imagination Technologies. "With PowerVR Series7, we have not only honed our architecture but also our IP support with tools such as our Design Optimization Kits for rapid physical and performance optimization. These allow our partners to choose right-sized solutions based on the optimum balance of power, performance and area for every segment."
For lower end and embedded devices, Series7XE GPUs fit the bill. They're based on a single scalable cluster of up to 32 multi-threaded multi-tasking ALU cores. According to Imagination Technologies, they make it possible to run the latest games and apps on power-constrained entry-level and mid-range mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes, and wearables.
The PowerVR Series7XT family of GPUs, on the other hand, are performance oriented for 3D gaming and GPU compute chores. These GPUs target mid-range to high-end applications, including smartphones and tablets, though also extend on up to Ultra HD TVs, game consoles, and high-performance server compute chores.
According to Imagination Technologies, the Series7XE and Series7XT offer up to 100 percent and 60 percent performance increases, respectively, compared to equivalent configurations in the PowerVR Series6 line. They also introduce things like geometry shader support, tessellation support, virtulalization and security hardware support, optional DirectX 11 and OpenCL feature packs, and more.