Imagination Technologies, a leading designer of mobile graphics processing technologies, has unveiled its new chip design – PowerVR SGX545 – that supports desktop application programming interfaces (APIs), including DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0 in addition to mobile OpenGL ES 2.x API. This is the first PowerVR chip in years that can power not only handsets, but other classes of devices, including netbooks, nettops or even notebooks.

“PowerVR SGX545 takes the possibilities of hand-held graphics to a new level by delivering a full DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.x feature set as well as delivering GPU powered OpenCL heterogeneous parallel processing capabilities for the mobile and embedded markets. This makes PowerVR SGX545 a compelling solution for application processor SoC designers targeting the next generation of netbook and MID mobile products demanding exceptional graphics capabilities,” said Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing at Imagination.

The heart of PowerVR SGX545 is USSE (Universal Scalable Shader Engine), the main programmable processing unit within each PowerVR SGX545 pipeline, is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. USSE can be programmed using the GLSL language that forms part of the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, or in the C-based parallel processing language used in the OpenCL specification .

PowerVR SGX545 delivers the broadest range of graphics API feature sets in the industry, while also enabling developers to gain greater access to the full capabilities of the USSE-powered GPGPU in a broad range of applications including digital imaging, video processing, game physics, cryptography, and other general computing tasks that can benefit from parallel processing.

According to Imagination Technologies, PowerVR SGX545 delivers real-world performance of 40 million polygons/sec and 1Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz, and is capable of driving HD screens with ultra smooth high frame rate 3D graphics content. Based on pixel fillrate at 200MHz, performance of PowerVR SGX545 seems to be in line with the speed of modern integrated graphics cores, such as AMD 790GX that has maximum fillrate of 2.8Gpixel/sec at 700MHz maximum clock-speed.

PowerVR SGX545 is available for licensing now. The IP is already proven in silicon in a test chip from Imagination and licensed by a lead partner, the company said without disclosing, who is a lead partner of Imagination Technologies.

Tags: Imagination Technologies, PowerVR, GPGPU, OpenCL, DirectX, OpenGL