Imagination, the company behind the graphics GPUs found in many smartphones, has announced its new Series 6 chips. The PowerVR G6200 and G6400 will be up to 20x faster than current offerings.
One of the companies that puts Imagination GPUs in its mobile devices is Apple. And you might remember that the iPhone and iPad rely heavily on the GPU not just for stunning games like Infinity Blade but also to do a lot of regular computing. Thus, these new chips could make performance of the A6 system-on-a-chip leap far ahead of today's speeds.
What's more, Imagination has purposely tweaked its new architecture to focus more on these non-gaming tasks. "If you're doing anything that's compute-intensive, you do it on the GPU, not the CPU, because the horsepower – the raw density of processing per square millimeter and per milliwatt – is vastly different," said Imagination's marketing chief Tony King-Smith to The Register.
This could see tablets (the iPad) getting close to the big, "proper" consoles in terms of performance, at least to the eyes of casual gamers like me. And maybe it could vastly speed up things like photo and video-editing.
Are these claims of 20x performance exaggerations? Not according to King-Smith. "These numbers are very, very real," he said, "realized in a real benchmark running on a real chip." Yikes!
Imagination announces first PowerVR Series6 GPU cores [Imagination via Touch Arcade]
