Pixelworks has been getting some design wins for its V7 visual processor. The chipset is incorporated in the OnePlus Ace 2 and it may have helped the newly released Honor Magic5 Pro take Apple’s display crown.
It’s worth taking a closer look at the company’s technology. Jon Peddie Research believes the company has been successful in pushing quality by using an expert-trained video motion estimation and compensation algorithm in silicon for video frame interpolation, offloading some of the onerous graphics tasks from existing systems-on-a-chip (SoC), and getting it right for smartphones that eat up multimedia content. The company has taken its work in film and TV processing and is pretty much handing it to smartphone users now. The Honor Magic5 Pro benchmark results could be the best indication we have of how well it is going for Pixelworks and that means the display market for smartphone can open up to new opportunities because the tech is there to give Android devices a level playing field with Apple.
Smartphone Gamers Understand Graphics Processing
Gaming is big business. In places like China, where 20% of the world’s estimated 3.3 billion gamers reside, game play is mostly done on a smartphone. Games like Genshin Impact and PC games like Cyberpunk 2077 were ported from the PC to smartphones challenging the phone’s performance, making it do more, running down the battery, and heating it up enough to sizzle.
Pixelworks’ answer to the demands of smartphone gaming was the X7 chip chipset. This post-processor offloads processing from the phone’s SoC, taking care of the motion vectors and, working with the game engine developers, using metadata to guarantee the best gaming experiences.
The largest Chinese phone OEMs are shipping their top phones with Pixelworks’ chips. The leading game engine providers, such as Unity, have partnered with the company. The big game studios—ByteCance, Tencent, miHoYo—have engaged with Pixelworks, and mobile SoC processor makers such as MTK and Qualcomm are working with the firm. The X7 is a tiny chip and draws so little power the smartphone hardly knows it is running.
Founded in 1997, Pixelworks developed video processors for professional projectors. The mythology of the company is the CEO or CTO (the story varies depending on who is telling it) was chatting at a conference with a CTO or president of a phone company and said, “it’s my dream that someday we will have smartphones that you can watch a movie on. It will be as good as if you were in the theater.” The Pixelworks guy went home thinking about that, and the next day he told his team that he had got an idea.
A few years later, visiting the lab, one could see a big 4K screen showing video and games as if an enthusiast-level PC drove it—but it wasn’t—it was driven by a two-year-old smartphone and not even a top-of-the-line one at that. Pixelworks has managed to beat out the top SoC builders in Silicon Valley and San Diego in video processing. The tantalizing end of this story is the future. Pixelworks has now proven its bespoke approach to video processing—pixel polishing works; in fact, it works almost better than they thought it would. And it’s scalable. It will ride Moore’s Law and just get better with each generation.
