Imagination Technologies is a little company that most people don’t know about, but they make some of the best graphics processors on the planet. We’re not talking about desktop gaming here either, we’re talking mobile. Their PowerVR SGX 535 is inside Apple’s iPhone and iPad and now Imagination is talking up the SGX543MP, SGX544MP, and giving us a sneak peak at the all new PowerVR Series 6 architecture. The SGX543MP comes in configurations ranging from dual to 16 core, has OpenCL compatibility, something already baked into Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, and uses less power than GPUs of previous generations. It’s going to be inside Sony’s upcoming PSP2. The SGX544MP is much like the SGX543MP, except that it has full support for DirectX 9; it’s going to be bundled inside the OMAP 5 from Texas Instruments. But let’s get to the good stuff already: PowerVR 6, codename “Rogue”. It promises to deliver performance levels that are 20x to 100x faster than the PowerVR 5 architecture, all while using less than 1 milliwatt. ST-Ericsson is one of the first companies to build a product around this new GPU, but it’s sadly going to be roughly 2 years before we see any devices hit the market that have this crazy chip inside.
Now forget about games for a second. They’re cool, and they kill time, but this horsepower is going to be put to good use by driving the next generation of user interfaces. Think the 3.5 year old iPhone UI needs a makeover? You’re not alone. And what about Android? When Google showed off Honeycomb they emphasized how many transitions and other small subtle effects they threw into the OS just because they could and because it helped make the user interface easier and more intuitive to use. We’re not going to have to wait much longer to start flicking around 1080p videos and multitasking like animals thanks to the hardware inside our pockets.
Note: Apple owns around 9.5% of Imagination, so that’s why this news is important.
[Via: Electronista]