Imagination’s new PowerVR series 7 mobile GPUs offer 60 percent performance jump

Imagination technologies unveiled their PowerVR series 7 GPU’s, promising a substantial performance jump over the current gen Series 6 GPU’s. Imagination claims that there is a 60 percent performance difference between the PowerVR series 6 and series 7 GPU’s. It is notable that Apple uses the current gen PowerVR series 6 graphics on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus.

The newly unveiled PowerVR series 7 GPU’s are capable of putting down more performance per mW, says Imagination. PowerVR series 7 brings improved efficiency, virtualization support, hardware tessellation, Optional DirectX 11 and HPC (High Performance Compute) support. Devices running Microsoft Windows will be able to exploit the DirectX 11 support with these GPU’s. Here are the various versions along with their capabilities. The higher-end versions are expected to be targeted at tablet and hybrid device space while the low power vairants should make it to mobile phones.

• PowerVR GT7200: 2 shading clusters, 64 ALU cores
• PowerVR GT7400: 4 shading clusters, 128 ALU cores
• PowerVR GT7600: 6 shading clusters, 192 ALU cores
• PowerVR GT7800: 8 shading clusters, 256 ALU cores
• PowerVR GT7900: 16 shading clusters, 512 ALU cores

All the 7 series graphic chips from PowerVR will support latest features from all major compute and graphic API’s such as OpenGL ES 3.1+AEP, OpenGL 4.4, OpenCL 1.2FP,Renderscript and, DirectX 11.

We can expect devices running with the PowerVR series 7 GPU’s in 12 to 18 months which would be competing against the Maxwell architecture based Nvidia graphic chips.

Source: imgtec