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PowerVR Upgraded for Lower Cost UHD

Imagination Technologies has new PowerVR GPUs for cost-sensitive devices. The PowerVR Series9XE and 9XM GPUs maintain fillrate density and are said to provide a significant boost in performance density. The chips are designed for a range of devices including smartphones, automotive infotainment, set-top boxes and TVs.

The new Series9XE GPU chips extend the fillrate/mm² performance of last year’s PowerVR 8XE series of GPUs to deliver good performance for GUI, HMI (human machine interface) and casual gaming on cost-efficient products including DTVs, set-top boxes, streaming sticks/dongles, automotive infotainment and cluster electronics, and entry-level mobile and tablet devices. The range has been extended with a new eight pixel/clock (8PPC) core which is said to be ideal for GUI-focused applications requiring support for 4K60.

The Series9XM GPUs, with increased compute density (GFLOPS/mm2), are claimed to be the industry’s best graphics cores for compute and gaming on devices such as premium gaming set-top boxes, mid-range smartphones and tablets, and automotive infotainment systems, with the ability to scale to 4K and beyond.

Both families have 25% reduction in the memory bandwidth needed and there is support for 10 bit YUV.

Jon Peddie, president, JPR Research, said:

“With its new range of PowerVR GPUs, Imagination is offering what we think is the widest range of operating points to balance fillrate, GFLOPS, power and cost for dozens of specific applications. The continued focus on the performance and fillrate efficiency will enable this year’s devices to offer a meaningful boost in performance like never before, the consumers are going to be thrilled.”

Features include

  • Support for Khronos graphics APIs including OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0; and advanced compute and vision APIs such as RenderScript, OpenVX 1.1 and OpenCL 1.2 EP
  • Optional support for PVRIC3, the latest PowerVR lossless image compression technology for optimal system integration efficiency.