Imagination Technologies announced on Wednesday that it has developed a new PowerVR graphics processor IP core, the PowerVR Series5XE GX5300. This is the industry’s smallest Android compatible GPU solution, featuring a small 0.55 mm2 (250 MHz in 28 nm) silicon footprint. This GPU core includes the company's PVRTC texture compression technology, OpenGL ES 2.0 capability, and ultra-low power consumption.
The GX5300 includes the PowerVR's programmable shader-based Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) architecture, which leads to the lowest possible power consumption per frame, and high performance efficiency, according to a company press release. PVRTC technology warrants superior image quality and a minimum memory footprint, the company claimed.
Tony King-Smith, marketing chief for Imagination Technologies, said that he could see this graphics core taking root in low-cost smartphones and tablets, wearables and IoT devices. "Imagination's silicon IP will be at the center of many of these devices with our PowerVR GPUs, video and vision processors, MIPS CPUs and Ensigma Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, complemented by our FlowCloud device-to-cloud software platform," he added.
Developers wanting to get their hands on the graphics core can get free access to the SDK, which is a cross-platform toolkit designed to support "all aspects of 3D graphics application development." Developers are urged to join the PowerVR Insider community, download the SDK, and then interact with the community.
Imagine Technologies' new PowerVR GX5300 core is available for licensing now.
Follow Kevin Parrish @exfileme. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.