Skip to main content

PowerVR Series 6 mobile GPUs announced: five times more efficient, 20 times more powerful

PowerVR Series 6 mobile GPUs announced: five times more efficient, 20 times more powerful

/

Imagination Technologies, the guys who design the graphics cores inside many modern smartphones, are today announcing that the next generation of their PowerVR GPU is ready to go into production.

Share this story

imagination technologies 640
imagination technologies 640

Imagination Technologies, the guys who design the graphics cores inside many modern smartphones, are today announcing that the next generation of their PowerVR GPU is ready to be licensed out. The PowerVR Series 6 is starting off with two core designs, the G6400 and G6200, but will continue to expand into "a growing family." Imagination claims the sixth generation of its graphics core can deliver "20x or more" the performance of current-gen hardware, while also being five times more efficient. That's thanks to producing the highest GFLOPS both per mW and per square millimeter.

The maximum computational performance is said to "reach the teraFLOPS range," though it's not entirely clear whether either of the particular core designs introduced today are capable of it. The difference between them is that the G6400 has four of Imagination's new compute clusters, whereas the G6200 only has two. Eight chip makers have already signed up for a PowerVR Series 6 license, including Texas Instruments and ST-Ericsson. Qualcomm recently signed up to become a PowerVR licensee too, and though it isn't named in the press release, it'd make perfect sense that the Series 6 was the thing that attracted the giant chipmaker to get involved.