Imagination's GPU cores aimed at mass-market apps

Imagination Technologies has uncloaked a series of PowerVR Series6XE Rogue graphics processing (GPU) IP cores geared for cost-sensitive, mass-market applications. According to the firm, the Series6XE family is intended to enable high-quality graphics and efficient GPU compute performance for products such as entry-level mobile devices and tablets, as well as wearables and other consumer products including DTVs and STBs.

The Series6XE cores take advantage of the latest architectural advances and offer a balance of silicon area and performance that is ideal for designing an OpenGL ES 3.0 and GPU compute-capable range of low-cost, highly capable devices. The cores go beyond the already highly-efficient design of the Rogue Series6 G6100, which has also been updated and further optimized as part of the Series6XE family.

Series6XE cores claim to offer a comprehensive and feature-rich range of solutions delivering the best combination of area-efficiency, power consumption and performance.

The PowerVR Series6XE G6050 boasts a highly innovative design that takes advantage of the latest Rogue architectural developments and extends the scalability beyond one cluster to a half-cluster while maintaining full software compatibility, creating the smallest fully-featured OpenGL ES3.0 and OpenCL-capable GPU core available. The core's highly-efficient fillrate throughput makes it ideal for a range of entry-level mobile products, wearables and other consumer devices, noted the company.

The PowerVR Series6XE G6060 augments the half-cluster design of the G6050 with the addition of Imagination's second generation lossless image compression (PVRIC2), providing an optimal balance of small size and bandwidth reduction for products such as entry-level mobile products, tablets and full HDTVs and set-top boxes.

The PowerVR Series6XE G6100 is an updated and further optimized version of the original core and features a single Unified Shader Cluster (USC) combined with a high-performance texture mapping unit, enabling it to deliver the same raw fillrates as multi-processor GPUs from the previous generation.

The PowerVR Series6XE G6110 is a single-cluster core that extends the above G6100 design, adding PVRIC2 for improved throughput, reduced bandwidth, conserved power and improved system performance, key for products such as low-cost 4K UltraHD TVs and tablets where bandwidth is a limited, valuable resource.

PVRIC2 in the G6060 and G6110 cores is key for meeting the cost-sensitive targets of entry-level designs, since the bandwidth reduction enables significantly lower system-level cost through lower-cost memory subsystems in the SoC, lower-cost memory modules and overall device BOM cost reduction.

Imagination's physical Design Optimization Kits (DOKs) for PowerVR Rogue IP cores offer customers the flexibility to optimize for power, performance and area (PPA), leading to significantly better quality of results with shorter design cycle times, as well as reduced silicon area and power consumption. Imagination's DOKs are comprised of optimized reference floorplans/design flows based on industry-leading EDA software, tuned libraries from partners, characterisation data and documentation.

Imagination provides developers with free access to the PowerVR Graphics SDK, a cross-platform toolkit designed to support all aspects of 3D graphics application development. The PowerVR Series6XE cores are available for licensing.