Imagination Technologies is probably best known for its PowerVR graphics processors featured in Apple’s wildly popular iOS mobile devices, as PowerVR S-series chips have powered every Apple mobile device since the third-generation iPhone 3GS.
This week, the company debuted the PowerVR GX6650, a 192-core GPU at the 2014 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain.
The new mobile GPU design will be embedded in upcoming mobile processors with integrated graphics. It is also likely that the 192-core mobile GPU will also tip up in next-gen Apple products in 2014 and beyond.
“Apple’s custom A-series chips that power the iPhone and iPad use PowerVR graphics processors,” AppleInsider staff explained. ”Apple’s latest flagship silicon, the A7 CPU found in the iPad Air and iPhone 5s, uses Imagination’s PowerVR Series 6 graphics.”
According to AI, Imagination has been talking up the new PowerVR GX6650 GPU as the most powerful GPU IP core available on the market today – besting even Nvidia’s upcoming Tegra K1 platform. The new high-end mobile graphics chip is targeted at processors in high-end, high-resolution tablets and 4K smart TVs.
The PowerVR GX6650 boasts 6 unified shading clusters and 192 cores, allowing it to process 12 pixels per clock.
Not surprisingly, power consumption on the latest PowerVR has been kept low, even with the additional performance boost.
Power sipping is managed by the PowerGearing G6XT included in the GPU, while the PVR3C is tasked with optimally compressing textures, frame buffers and geometry.
