Introducing the state-of-the-art of watch graphics.
Imagination Technologies, the maker of the PowerVR graphics processor IP found in Apple's iPhone and iPad A-series chipsets, has announced the PowerVR G6020, which is aimed at low-end smartphones and... high end smartwatches. According to AnandTech:
From a design perspective, the G6020 is aimed at very simple desktop workloads – the Android UI, wearable interfaces, etc. Imagination has essentially built the bare minimum GPU needed to drive a 720p60 display, taking out any hardware not necessary to that goal such as compute and quite a bit of geometry throughput. What remains is enough of a ROP backend (pixel co-processor) to drive 720p, and the FP16 shading resources to go with it.
And:
The end result of their efforts is designed to be an incredibly small and incredibly low power OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU for devices that fall in the cheap/small range. G6020 is only 2.2mm2 in size on 28nm, making it similar in size to ARM's Cortex-A7 CPU cores (a likely pairing target). And power consumption is low enough that it should be able to just fit into high-end wearables.
Until the inevitable teardowns, it'll be hard to know for sure what GPU Apple is using in the Apple Watch's S1 computer-on-a-chip. Since the company has such a significant history with the PowerVR, and Imagination has chips like the G6020, it may at least give us a clue as to what sorts of capabilities and power efficiencies are available in cutting edge ultra-ultra-mobile graphics these days.
More info: AnandTech; via @danmatte
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