Imagination and TSMC partner to drive industry-leading performance on GPUs

Initial effort using PowerVR Series6 cores achieves 25% performance boost; 30% in key blocks

Sunnyvale, CA – 28 August 2013 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L), a leading multimedia, processor, communications and cloud technologies company, announced today that it is working together with TSMC to drive next-generation performance to new levels on Imagination’s industry-leading PowerVR GPUs. Initial efforts have already achieved 25% overall performance improvement for the PowerVR Series6 GPU core, with key blocks demonstrating as much as 30% improvement compared to existing design flows.

Imagination R&D teams working with TSMC are developing highly-optimised IP libraries and fully characterised reference system designs for Imagination’s IP cores on TSMC’s advanced processes including 28HPM and 16nm FinFET technologies. This collaboration will enable mutual customers to achieve significant performance gains for next-generation applications. Leveraging extensive analysis of factors affecting performance, Imagination is taping out a highly optimised next-generation multi-core, multi-cluster PowerVR Series6 GPU design to characterise these performance improvements and plans to demonstrate a test chip later this year. The resulting reference flow and optimised libraries will enable SoC designers to significantly accelerate time-to-market and increase performance for similar implementations of PowerVR Series6 GPUs.

Says Tony King-Smith, Imagination EVP marketing: “The growing reliance on graphics processors to power the best user experiences means the GPU has become the new silicon process driver for the coming decade. It occupies as much as 50% or more of leading edge SoCs, and demands the highest performance memory bandwidth while always delivering high performance at low power. These characteristics are critical to defining the key device parameters of future generation processes. We’re delighted to be working closely with TSMC to ensure future silicon technologies are fully tuned to the needs of next generation’s most advanced SoCs.”

“Imagination is constantly pushing the envelope in graphics technologies, including exciting new areas such as ray tracing that will help its customers gain maximum benefit from power-efficient silicon processes,” says Suk Lee, TSMC senior director, Design Infrastructure Marketing Division. “Our collaboration with Imagination is helping to optimise future generations of our most advanced process technologies and system design techniques. We are looking forward to the continued expansion of our relationship with Imagination to encompass GPUs, CPUs and more.”

Imagination is a member of TSMC’s Soft-IP Alliance program, through which it is validating its major core IP families to provide the most optimised technologies for mutual customers. Imagination’s IP portfolio is unrivalled in its breadth, including industry-leading PowerVR GPUs (graphics processors) and VPUs (video processors), popular MIPS CPUs and embedded processors; advanced Ensigma RPUs (radio processors) and other IP families.

About Imagination

Imagination Technologies - a global leader in multimedia, processor, communication and cloud technologies - creates and licenses market-leading processor solutions including graphics, video, vision, CPU and embedded processing, multi-standard communications, cross-platform V.VoIP and VoLTE, and cloud connectivity. These silicon and software intellectual property (IP) solutions for systems-on-chip (SoC) are complemented by an extensive portfolio of software, tools and ecosystems. Target markets include mobile phone, connected home consumer, mobile and tablet computing, in-car electronics, networking, telecoms, health, smart energy and connected sensors. Imagination's licensees include many of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers, network operators and OEM/ODMs. Corporate headquarters are located in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.