Imagination's Series3NX neural network accelerator helps UNISOC to create 5G smartphone platform

Outstanding PPA and scalability enables SoC manufacturer to achieve leading AI capabilities

London, England and Shanghai, China - December 20, 2021 – Imagination Technologies announces that UNISOC, a leading fabless semiconductor company, has used Imagination’s Series3NX neural network accelerator (NNA) IP in its Tanggula T770 and T760 system-on-chips (SoCs), its new smartphone 5G platforms.

Series3NX enables Tanggula T770 and T760 to achieve industry-leading AI capabilities with its outstanding PPA (performance, power, area). This collaboration continues years of cooperation between the two companies in AI and graphics processing.

UNISOC’s Tanggula T770 and T760 SoCs adopt Imagination's PowerVR AX3596 NNA core. Imagination's Series3NX NNA IP has the leading performance and energy efficiency in the market and is now the leading embedded solution for neural network hardware acceleration. Series3NX provides unrivalled scalability, enabling the SoC manufacturers to optimise compute power and performance across a range of embedded markets such as automotive, camera, mobile and IoT edge devices.

Building on the success of its multi award-winning predecessor, Series3NX further implements architectural enhancements like lossless weight compression, improving the performance by 40% in the same silicon area over the previous generation, and helping SoC manufacturers have a nearly 60% improvement in performance efficiency and a 35% reduction in bandwidth. Series3NX supports both single core and multi-core designs. The smallest Series3NX single core is smaller than a pinhead but has a performance of up to 0.6 tera operations per second (TOPS). The compute power of largest single core reaches up to 10TOPS.

The AX3596 core used by UNISOC is the highest performance single core product. The multi-core design can scale to up to 160 TOPS, enough for the most demanding Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) applications.

Chris Porthouse, Chief Product Officer, Imagination Technologies, says: "As a leading global supplier of core chipsets in mobile communications and the IoT, UNISOC is showing its determination to innovate to the whole industry, and the latest Tanggula T770 and T760 5G smartphone platforms are proof of that. Congratulations to UNISOC on the launch of T770 and T760 SoC, which follow the Tanggula T740. We are pleased that our neural network acceleration cores can enable these three SoCs to achieve the most efficient AI performance."

Eric Zhou, SVP, UNISOC, says: "The cooperation between UNISOC and Imagination has a long history. Imagination’s industry-leading technologies in AI and graphics processing are the guarantee for our continuous cooperation. The integration of Imagination's Series3NX NNA technology into the Tanggula T770 and T760 is another significant milestone of cooperation between the two parties. We look forward to more strategic cooperation with Imagination in the future, to jointly drive the rapid intelligent upgrade for mobile, consumer electronics, IoT, industry and other fields."

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination is a UK-based company that creates silicon and software IP (intellectual property) designed to give its customers an edge in competitive global technology markets. Its GPU, CPU and AI technologies enable outstanding power, performance, and area (PPA), fast time-to-market and lower total cost of ownership. Products based on Imagination IP are used by billions of people across the globe in their smartphones, cars, homes, and workplaces.

See www.imaginationtech.com.