Texas Instruments, a leading developer of multimedia and communications chips, has licensed PowerVR SGX 5XT, the latest graphics processing core from Imagination Technologies, with the aim to redefine performance of graphics processing units inside handheld devices.

Texas Instruments will deploy the multi-core PowerVR SGX 5XT graphics processing technology in future OMAP platform-based system-on-chip designs for sSmartphones and other mobile devices. Although both TI and Imagination remain tight-lipped about projected performance, TI claims that the collaboration will “define a new zenith of graphics performance” for mobile platforms which operate at extremely low power and will deliver advanced functionality and graphics capabilities across multiple high resolution screens all while dramatically increasing performance.

The core part of the PowerVR SGX 5XT is the new USSE2 (Universal Scalable Shader Engine 2), the main programmable processing unit within each PowerVR SGX 5XT pipeline, is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. USSE2 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.

Imagination Technologies claims that the USSE2 delivers significantly higher processing throughput of the earlier Series5 USSE shader engine, as well as other architectural extensions enabling low-power and high-performance for 2D, 3D and general purpose (GPGPU) processing in either single core or scalable multi-processor (MP) solutions.

PowerVR SGX 5XT 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 USSE2-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.

"We are delighted to confirm that we have extended our long-standing relationship with TI. Our core technology continues to be vital to the significant and growing success of TI’s OMAP processors, an industry leading mobile and embedded SoC platform. This agreement will help Imagination deliver its latest outstanding PowerVR graphics technologies into the hands of device manufacturers, developers and consumers for years to come,” said Hossein Yassaie, chief executive officer of ImgTec.

Tags: Imagination Technologies, PowerVR, Texas Instruments, OMAP, OpenCL, OpenGL, GPGPU