Imagination is using MWC 2015 to launch a few new products, the first of which is an entry-level GPU designed for low-end phones, high-end wearables, and embedded devices. The PowerVR G6020 is the lowest-end part in Imagination's Series6XE family, and it targets 720p60 displays with enough power for rendering animations and other low-power tasks.
The PowerVR G6020 comes with just a four pipeline USC, and has ditched features like tessellation and GPU computing. The result is a GPU so efficient and small that it should be suitable for high-end smartwatches, taking up just 2.2 square mm when when produced at 28nm, similar in size to ARM's entry-level Cortex-A7 CPU core.
Alongside the G6020, PowerVR has announced a range of HEVC/H.265 hardware encoding blocks for their PowerVR Series 5 family. These types of processors are designed mostly for embedded applications such as cameras, sensors, and some mobile devices.
Three HEVC encoders have been announced: the E5300, E5505 and E5800. The E5800, which is targeted at prosumers, is the most powerful of the encoders, capable of 2160p60 (4K) encoding with 4:2:2 chroma sampling. The E5505 supports 2160p30, and the E5300 does 1080p30.
These HEVC encoders are particularly important as we push towards high quality videos with lower bitrates. Imagination says that their encoders can achieve the same quality as competing products with just 70% of the bandwidth, thanks to newer encoding technologies. If chips like this can become more prevalent in the market, we can begin to move away from H.264 as the video compression standard.
Both the G6020 and the range of HEVC encoders are now available for sampling. This means that, with any luck, we'll see them in devices towards the end of the year.
https://www.techspot.com/news/59913-imagination-launches-low-end-powervr-g6020-gpu-h265.html
