Imagination announces first PowerVR Series8XT IP core based on new Furian GPU architecture

Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) announces the first GPU IP core based on its new PowerVR Furian architecture, the Series8XT GT8525. Furian is designed to enable a new generation of consumer devices to deliver high-resolution, immersive graphics content and data computation for sustained time periods within mobile power budgets. The two-cluster GT8525 offers class-leading performance, power and area, as well as unique features for customers designing SoCs for products such as high-end smartphones and tablets, mid-range dedicated VR and AR devices and mid- to high-end automotive infotainment and ADAS systems.

Says Chris Longstaff, senior director of product and technology marketing, PowerVR at Imagination: “The new GT8525 is the first of a range of Series8XT GPUs designed around our highly efficient and scalable Furian architecture. This IP core delivers on the market requirements for a number of high-volume applications. It continues and strengthens the performance/mW leadership position of the PowerVR XT family, whilst supporting a very rich set of features.”

Says Jon Peddie, president, JPR Research: “Imagination has an extremely strong track record at the high end of the mobile market, and the Furian architecture extends that technology leadership. With the GT8525, Imagination is delivering a new performance point for off-the-shelf mobile GPUs, while continuing to provide great power efficiency, in large part due to techniques like Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR).”

Says Tatiana Solokhina, CTO, RnD Center ELVEES: “As a provider of SoCs for a wide range of global video analytics applications, we require a GPU that offers the best compute performance in a power constrained footprint. The new PowerVR Furian 8XT family from Imagination provides us an industry-leading GPU with new ALU for increased performance density and efficiency. In addition, support for standard compute APIs such as OpenVX enables easy implementation of real world vision processing applications.”

Addressing the needs of next generation applications

The Furian architecture is designed for the evolved graphics and compute needs of next-generation consumer devices:

• Smartphones: the GT8525 addresses the need for continuous improvements in sustained performance for gaming in constrained power footprints, including for mobile VR uses. It also allows new mobile use cases requiring greater compute availability, such as the use of neural networks (including CNNs) for object identification.
• Automotive: with dramatically increased compute efficiency and built-in hardware virtualization, the GT8525 addresses the increasing trend toward combining infotainment with electronic dash and some ADAS functionality on the same SoC. OEMs can enable isolation of concurrent functions and services to ensure greater safety and security while saving on valuable silicon area.
• AR/VR: the GT8525 provides the high resolution and high sustained frame rate graphics required for a great user experience on standalone AR/VR headsets. The GT8525 includes hardware and software specifically designed for minimizing the critical motion-to-photon latency. With devices based on the GT8525, OEMs can offer higher performance graphics and compute in an area efficient manner. Developers can leverage the power of the OpenVX* API on PowerVR for rapid application development.

PowerVR Series8XT GT8525 by the numbers

The Furian architecture is designed for enhanced performance, with power efficiency, setting it apart from competing solutions in performance per mW. Compared to the Series7XT GT7200 GPU, the GT8525 achieves:

• More than 50% fps improvement on the industry-standard Manhattan benchmark test, one of the de-facto benchmarks for mobile and other applications, and 80% TRex
• More than 50% improvement in fps for the Antutu benchmark – another key benchmark
• 2x PPC throughput (8 pixels/clock compared with 4 for GT7200), allowing for higher resolutions, and additional performance for previously fill rate limited use cases
• 50% more GFLOPs, and more accessible GFLOPs, enabling easier exploitation of the cores full potential for graphics and compute

The Furian difference

The Furian architecture at the heart of the GT8525 features improvements in performance density, GPU efficiency, and system efficiency which lead to lower power and a better user experience for next-generation applications. It incorporates many of the compelling features on which PowerVR has built its technology leadership, including Imagination’s Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), which has been proven over multiple generations of PowerVR GPUs to provide the most highly efficient embedded graphics.

Furian also features a new 32-wide ALU cluster design for increased performance density and efficiency. A new instruction set architecture (ISA) in the primary and secondary ALU pipelines enables improved utilization of resources and thus efficiency, and multi-threading optimizations allow efficient and very flexible access to on-chip local compute memory. Furian is designed to address the increasing compute requirements across multiple applications and market segments with efficient use of compute APIs including OpenCL® 2.0, Vulkan® 1.0 and OpenVX 1.1*.