Imagination reveals new PowerVR Series9 GPUs

Setting new standards for performance, power and area

London, UK and Shenzhen, China – 4^th December 2018 – Imagination Technologies announces PowerVR Series9XEP, Series9XMP, and Series9XTP. Representing PowerVR’s best-ever GPU line-up, these three new Series9 GPU families range from entry-level to high-end and incorporate efficiency improvements and new features to deliver outstanding performance.

PowerVR Series9 GPUs will ensure class-leading graphics and smooth GUIs on products such as smartphones, automotive infotainment products, set-top boxes and TVs. The new GPUs enable SoC designers and OEMs to ensure their products stand out from the crowd by delivering a compelling user experience with the lowest possible power consumption and cost.

The new GPUs include:

• PowerVR Series9XEP: based on the Rogue architecture, these cores continue the fillrate/mm² leadership of this class of PowerVR GPUs. They feature PVRIC4 visually lossless compression to ensure reduced bandwidth and memory footprint, enabling the lowest system cost with the best user experience for GUI, HMI (human machine interface) and casual gaming. Target products include set-top boxes, DTVs, low-cost mobile devices, mid-range automotive dashboards and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI).
• PowerVR Series9XMP: with significantly increased compute density (GFLOPS/mm²), these Rogue-architecture based GPUs offer the industry’s best compute and gaming experience on mid-range mobile devices, set-top boxes and DTVs, and provide the foundation for AI and neural network processing on the GPU.
• PowerVR Series9XTP: based on a development of the Furian architecture, these new GPUs have dramatically increased gaming/compute density and extensive power/performance/area (PPA) optimisations throughout the design, making them ideal for premium mobile devices and high-end IVI, as well as applications across compute/server segments.

“With PowerVR GPUs, we are focused on helping our customers create products that stand out at any price point,” said Nigel Leeder, executive vice president, PowerVR, Imagination. “These new GPUs are the best-ever mainstream PowerVR GPU cores and will enable us to continue to increase our Android device footprint and our overall volume across mobile, set-top boxes, DTVs, and automotive applications. With these latest GPUs, our customers can deliver even more differentiated and exciting products from entry-level to high-end.”

What’s so special about PowerVR?

PowerVR GPUs utilise a rendering technique called tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) which keeps almost all image processing ‘on-chip’ and minimises memory bandwidth requirements. This delivers outstanding efficiency compared to other GPU solutions. Throughout its 25-year history, PowerVR has enabled some of the best-loved console and arcade systems, kick-started the mobile graphics revolution, and filled the car dashboard with infotainment, navigation and driver assistance features.

Inside the new PowerVR Series9 GPUs

The new GPUs all incorporate PVRIC4, the new generation of Imagination’s powerful image compression technology that enables random-access visually lossless image compression, ensuring bandwidth and memory footprint savings of at least 50%, and enabling systems to overcome performance bandwidth constraints. The GPUs also offer enhanced performance/power/area and timing improvements versus previous generation GPUs, as well as new features including a new alpha buffer/block hint feature for reduced composition workload bandwidth and cost.

PowerVR Series9XEP GPUs were designed to go beyond the previous generation Series9XE GPUs with:

• Improved gaming and benchmark performance through microarchitectural tuning
• Reduced bandwidth through PVRIC4 and increased cache sizes
• Increased leadership in fillrate density
• Timing improvements to enable higher core clock speeds compared to the previous generation

PowerVR Series9XMP GPUs feature:

• Improved gaming/compute density with an up to a 45% increase for better gaming performance
• Gaming feature set improvements including anisotropic filtering (up to 2x speed) and shadow samplers (up to 4x speed)
• Increased arithmetic logic unit (ALU) density. The new generation extends the ALU by 2x per cluster, from 16-wide to up to 32-wide for increased performance
• Compute improvements including data paths (caching), atomic operations, datamaster setup rates, and full compute overlap with other workloads
• Reduced bandwidth through PVRIC4 and increased cache sizes
• Microarchitectural tuning and timing improvements

PowerVR Series9XTP GPUs improvements are:

• Increased gaming/benchmark density with an up to a 50% fps/mm² density increase
• Extensive PPA optimisations throughout the design including low-level architectural tuning
• More options for ALU width, now up to 40-wide per cluster for a significant increase in FLOP density
• Reduced bandwidth through PVRIC4 and increased cache sizes
• YUV speed up for 2- and 3-planar YUV

The new GPUs can be paired with the PowerVR Series3NX Neural Network Accelerator (NNA), using the GPU to manage classic vision and pre-processing algorithms and the Series3NX to handle highly optimised fixed point neural network processing.

The optimisations in the recently announced PowerVR Automotive pack can be applied to any of these PowerVR Series9 cores.

Software and tools support

Imagination provides developers with free access to the cross-platform PowerVR SDK, designed to support all aspects of 3D graphics application development; as well as tools and utilities that ease development of 3D graphics and GPU compute applications. The SDK and other resources are available through the PowerVR Insider community.

Physical Design Optimisation Kits (DOKs) for the new GPUs, comprised of optimised reference design flows, tuned libraries from partners, characterisation data and documentation, will provide customers with the flexibility to further optimise the PPA in their designs.

Availability

The new PowerVR GPUs are available for licensing now.