iPhone 5 and iPad 3 GPU Potentially Revealed

When Imagination Technologies announced the first licensees for the next-generation Series6 family in June 2011, Apple was not mentioned, though it was later revealed that the Cupertino company was indeed a partner.

The iPhone maker currently utilizes Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX543MP2 in their A5 system-on-a-chip (SoC).

So when Imagination unveiled the upcoming Series6 family this week, touting performance improvements of 20x or more for the G6400 and G6200, we had to ask: just how fast will the iPad 3 and iPhone 5 be?

There’s little to no doubt that Apple is one of the companies licensing the new technologies in their upcoming A6 processor believed to be used in the next-generation iPad and iPhone.

According to Imagination, “The innovative PowerVR Rogue architecture, on which Series6 is based, builds on the maturity and unrivalled success of the previous five generations of PowerVR GPUs.

“It enables Imagination’s partners to deliver amazing user experiences in devices from innovative ‘natural’ user interfaces to ultra-realistic gaming, as well as enabling new applications never before thought of from advanced content creation and image processing to sophisticated augmented reality and environment-aware solutions.”

The makers noted in a press release issued this week that the PowerVR Rogue architecture was based on a scalable number of compute clusters, and that the process was “designed to target the requirements of a growing range of demanding markets from mobile to the highest performance embedded graphics including smartphones, tablets, PC, console, automotive, DTV and more.”

PowerVR Series6 GPUs can deliver 20x or more of the brawn of current generation GPU cores, offering the best performance in both GFLOPS/mm2 and GFLOPS/mW, the company said.

“Based on our experience in shipping hundreds of millions of GPU cores, plus extensive market and customer feedback, we have been able to set a new standard in GPU architecture, particularly in the areas of power, bandwidth and efficiency – the key metrics by which GPUs are now judged,” said Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination. “We are confident that with the Rogue architecture we have a very clear technology advantage and an exceptional roadmap for the PowerVR Series6 family which our partners can depend on.”

So far, only ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Renesas Electronics and MediaTek have confirmed their partnership with Imagination regarding the use of the upcoming Series6 family. Apple is notoriously secretive when it comes to its contracts with various licensing partners.

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