Have you ever looked at your $100 smartphone or tablet after watching Unity’s ‘The Chase’ demo and said to yourself: “I wish my devices could run cool OpenGL® ES 3.0* content like that”? The good news coming out of CES 2014 is that soon they will, thanks to PowerVR Series6XE, a new family of Rogue GPUs we are introducing today.
Smartphone shipments alone will surpass one billion units in 2013, as the demand for low-cost smart computing and entertainment in emerging markets continues to increase and as the prices of devices continues to decrease. To put more perspective behind that number, the smartphone market in Asia is expected to be nearly twice as large as the U.S. market this year – and most of that market is based on entry-level and mid-range devices.
Designed to address this trend and fully support the latest graphics and compute APIs, including OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL™* 1.x, the new Series6XE GPUs will power a new generation of affordable mobile devices, including wearables, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other consumer electronics.
The Chase from Unity is a high-fidelity OpenGL ES 3.0 mobile graphics demo.
Imagine best-in-class, high-quality graphics and efficient, low-power compute, all packaged into the smallest, fully-featured GPU IP cores designed to date. The result? A new line-up of three PowerVR Rogue graphics cores that deliver the same fillrate performance as equivalent Series5XT multi-processor configurations but offer much more in terms of features and functionality.
The PowerVR Series6XE GPU IP family includes the following GPUs launched today at CES:
When it comes to entry-level and mid-range devices, finding the right balance of performance and features becomes a balancing act that not many can pull off, especially when you take area considerations into account.
Whenever consumers hear about entry-level, they usually think price, not features. While they can accept certain compromises for less expensive devices, consumers’ expectations are always high when it comes to performance. If you are a device manufacturer, you want to offer customers the best possible experience for a certain price point; customers never want a trade-off in features if that severely affects performance. For most people, performance comes first, while the feature set is much lower on the priority list.
This is where our PowerVR Series6XE Rogue GPUs step in. By providing optimized solutions for entry-level and mid-range platforms, we are providing an opportunity for silicon vendors to aggressively compete in performance and features while keeping costs down.
There are several examples of how our innovative technologies enable this.
Firstly, our PVR3C lossless and lossy compression technologies significantly lower system-level costs by reducing memory subsystem and RAM modules requirements for SoCs and thus bringing device bill of materials (BOM) costs down.
Since memory traffic is a major source for heat dissipation, PVR3C lowers power consumption at the system level, reducing the requirements for more expensive cooling methods.
Secondly, Design Optimization Kits (DOKs) for PowerVR Rogue GPUs allow customers to optimize for power, performance and area (PPA) in a much more flexible way compared to competing solutions. Our DOKs have been proven to deliver significantly better results, shorter design cycle times, as well as reduced silicon area and power consumption. For example, silicon vendors that license our DOKs for the PowerVR G6100 core can achieve up to 30% reduction in area.
Finally, one of the most important elements a consumer wants in an entry-level smart device is the knowledge that it will be compatible with mainstream and high-end solutions such as tablets, smartphones and other digital entertainment devices. Most mobile users own several devices including entry-level, mainstream and high-end systems. You want to avoid the negative experience where trying to get the same app to work across all devices becomes a chore; consumers are much more likely to dispose of the cheaper device first.
The new PowerVR Series6XE and Series6XT GPUs change this paradigm. They enable developers to target a scalable line of software compatible devices. The hardware feature set for all Rogue GPUs is transparent to app developers, meaning they do not have to worry about differences in instruction set. Even better, all Rogue GPUs are software compatible with the PowerVR SGX family, which makes porting code a breeze. This compatibility is valuable in helping developers and system integrators meet a wide range of market needs, enabling OEMs to create a complete range of devices that can essentially run the same software, albeit at different performance levels.
Now that we’ve run through all the advantages of our new Series6XE GPUs, you can understand what makes them perfect for entry-level devices. It’s certainly more than their raw performance or feature set; in that space, they already deliver greater performance per core compared to previous generation GPUs, all while supporting the latest graphics and compute API standards. What makes them unique is how they can efficiently enable tomorrow’s low-cost solutions by merely using a single or half-cluster design to provide the same or better performance to a competing dual- or quad-core solution.
For more news and announcements related to our PowerVR Rogue GPUs, please come back to our blog and follow us on Twitter (@ImaginationTech). If you are attending CES or MWC 2014, stop by Imagination’s booth to have a look at the latest demos and applications running on our customers’ PowerVR-based platforms.
Editor’s Note
* PowerVR Series6XE Rogue cores are based on published Khronos specifications, and are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process. Previous generation PowerVR GPU cores have already achieved conformance. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.
OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.
OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos.