Imagination reveals two new PowerVR GPUs

We’re expanding our PowerVR Series6 IP family with two new members: PowerVR G6230 and G6430 – two graphics processor cores with two and four clusters, respectively.

Providing our partners and our ecosystem with our latest and greatest IP accompanied by the right tools they require to succeed in the business is vital to us as a company. These new additions to our Series6 line-up will offer an opportunity for our licensees to have a wider choice.

But let’s rewind a bit. A while ago we introduced the first PowerVR Series6 GPUs cores, the PowerVR G6200 and G6400, which are designed to offer the best performance while also keeping the smallest area possible and staying true to our ultra-low power approach. Here are Imagination Technologies’ Tony King-Smith, VP of Marketing and Kristof Beets, Business Development Manager, detailing some of the benefits of the new PowerVR Series6 architecture:

With PowerVR G6230 and G6430, we’ve “gone all out”, aiming to set a new benchmark for high performance. They have been optimised for maximum efficiency but still manage to keep power consumption to a minimum even with an incremental increase in area. Consequently, they complement the G6200 and G6400 cores by delivering an unmatched power and performance per area rating without sacrificing anything from the Series6 standard feature set.

So what does “going all out” mean after all? With a 20x increase in performance compared to current GPU cores targeting comparable markets, the Series6 architecture is able to offer amazing computing horsepower (think in the range of 100s of GFLOPS to even the magnitude of TFLOPS), making it the perfect choice for handling complex user-interfaces and ultra-realistic gaming as well as applications like image processing or augmented and virtual reality. And with that kind of computing prowess, we’re talking about reaching levels of performance that approach the HPC market. But you know how the best things come in small packages. This means we can still give you the best performance per mm2 and per mW in the industry.

Also, because of our innovative multi-cluster architectural approach, we’ve been able to build on the success of PowerVR Series 5/5XT and offer a completely scalable roadmap which makes no compromises in terms of supporting all modern APIs (OpenCL, RenderScript Compute and Direct Compute), reducing memory bandwidth and providing a versatile line of cores that meets and exceeds the demands of our partners. Furthermore, with the widely used PVRTC texture compression and a new generation of our Tile Based Deferred Rendering architecture, you can rest assured we are continuing our mission to set the standard in the GPU market. Here is how the PowerVR Series6’s architecture looks overall:

PowerVR Series6 ‘Rogue’ architecture overview
The hundreds of millions of GPU cores shipped coupled with a market share of 78% in mobile devices GPU IP are strong signs we have been doing things right. So congratulations to our team of engineers who have been hard at work to deliver these amazing graphics cores which will bring a new wave of devices in your hands, homes and cars, making life a bit more colourful (always at the highest resolution, of course!)